Birdfeeders
Richard Holinger

BIRDFEEDERS ON the lowest oak tree branch swing like pendulums. Sixty mile-an-hour gusts, the radio says. Piss or spit into that and you’ll have it back in spades. Strong enough to scrape cow turds off a shitkicker sole. One pound package of ground chuck, eighty-percent lean, and a can of red kidney beans for supper. Next two, three nights, too, if lucky. The kid will eat it, if not too busy solving for X, where X equals his mother who blew out of the house four months ago. Postcard from Yosemite started, “Dear El Capitan.” I imagined the rest. Like her umbrage can affect me. The kid found it when searching for the car keys. Why he wanted to skedaddle, who can figure. Board, meals, entertainment all here. We watch the Bears games together. Most games.
“Where’d you want to go?” I ask him
“Where the postmark says.”
“Albuquerque, New Mexico?”
“Why not?” he says. “I don’t want to stay in this loser state.”
Losers are winners, I tell him. If you know what I mean. Take the Cubs or the Mets when they were newborns. Expect to lose, and a win turns, well, astonishing. Keep expectations low. Don’t be disappointed when shit happens 24-7. That way, when your mother comes back in that door, shows up crying apologetically for putting you and I through hell and back, like facing sixty mile-an-hour windstorms when temps already dropped into the thirties, I’ll say, “Hi, good-lookin, where ya been all my life?” like she’s just come back from taking a leak out back in the privy.
That’s what I’ll say.

~
Richard Holinger’s work has appeared in Southern Review, Witness, Chicago Quarterly Review, Hobart, Iowa Review, Boulevard, and garnered four Pushcart Prize nominations. Books include “North of Crivitz” (poetry) and “Kangaroo Rabbits and Galvanized Fences” (essays). “Not Everybody’s Nice” won the 2012 Split Oak Press Flash Prose Contest. He holds a PhD in Creative Writing from UIC. He lives northwest of Chicago far enough to see fox, deer, and turkeys cross his lawn.
~