ADGER'S WHARF

 

by Michael Stein

        

                                                                                        

I.

​

On the edge of the dock,

a spider crawls up my leg,

nuzzling into the scar on my left knee,

inverted from a childhood accident.

​

I was told on my 21st birthday

how my grandfather Louis died here.

I’ve heard it from six different relatives,

but this is the truth.

​

The moon cleans me as I strike the match

on a velvet red strip, lighting

my cigar and watching the fire grow,

letting it lick my nail

before I shake the flame away.

​

II.

​

Louis, in the washed lantern-light, steps onto his half-finished porch,

shining from a recent downpour.

“Put on your boots,” they say,

not to wake my grandmother or mother, age four.

​

In the amniotic fluid of the marsh I hear

two brothers walking from house to house, playing accordion and flute

“to drown the screams of Jewish women and children.”

Pluff mud invades my nostrils.

This is not the place to put the issue to rest.

​

Neighbors, co-workers, friends—their faces covered.

Louis, facing the water, stares out

into the dark.

Liquid sloshes back-and-forth in the metal canister.

​

He touches his watch chain, a gold Honors medallion from seventh grade;

peddling started at twelve.
 

His boss of fourteen years at the electric store on King St.

tells him to kneel.

​

Crunch.

​

His left knee smashes inward.

A match is struck and thrown.

​

III.

​

I see his body float to the surface, “writhing on his fat, wrinkly back, with twelve apostles

bending over the edge…faint grins filt over the corners of their mouths.”

I’ve heard the stories, but they register only as hyperbolic.

​

My grandfather’s house is gone, except a hand-built stone chimney,

sitting quietly in the yard of a new transplant’s home.

​

* * *

​

Michael Stein is a law student at Washington & Lee University and holds his BA in English Literature from the College of Charleston Honors College. He has been published in Deep South Magazine, Sanctuary and in YNST: (You’re Not Seeing Things) Magazine. He works as an editor for the Medical Literacy Initiative and is Editor-Emeritus for Miscellany Literary and Arts Journal.