Dad's Boots
Steve Gerson
Embedded Files
My dad's Nocona cowboy boots
vermin-skinned steel-toed
lie in my basement beneath
six cans of used paint mostly
black a child's broken toy
lost when a forgotten niece
visited dried flower arrangements
from a failed Thanksgiving
petals dropping like panicked
dreams the boot shafts tightly
stitched adorned with predatory
red tail hawks perched
each talon pinioning prey
on faded cacti the spines
exclamation points shrieking
heels rundown and dirt-caked
a barbed wire scar bisecting
the left instep like the serrated edge
of a thunderstorm the boots the color
of bad blood
Flash Issue 9
Steve Gerson writes poetry and flash about life's dissonance. He's proud to have published in Panoplyzine, Route 7, Poets Reading the News, Crack the Spine, the Decadent Review, Underwood Press, Dillydoun Review, In Parentheses, Vermilion, and more, plus his chapbook Once Planed Straight: Poetry of the Prairies from Spartan Press.
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