Park Ridgeway’s wife, this hot August afternoon,
comes shrieking across the street with one hand
over her left eye, beats on the front door,
and Skipper the Jack Russell terrier
goes hysterical, yapping and yodeling
and springing at the curtains and tearing them.
Just fine, just fine, my old man keeps saying,
and she’s there in the kitchen with a wet washcloth
over the swollen eye and crying and bending over
and then it really starts. I’m a little kid,
so I’m no help. What do I know? My mother
is running cold water on another washcloth
and folding it into a smaller square and trading
washcloths, and then you can hear these big feet
on the porch, and hollering, and I run into the front
hallway behind my father, and Ridgeway smashes
his fist through our leaded glass window
beside the front door and reaches around inside