3/27/13

Hail Mary Pass?
By Rex Sexton


Whirling and twirling through the smoke-filled
room, McSweeny’s “Irish Colleen” costumed
barmaids careen around the tables with frothy
trays of beer. The Steelers are winning.
McSweeny’s patrons are roaring. The jukebox
is playing Irish ballads everyone but me is
ignoring.
With a body so light, slight, cloudlike,
Heather floats through the uproar balancing a
fresh load of foaming mugs on her shoulder.
Her eyes sparkle and her smile shines, as she
circles and spirals around the rowdy mob of
guys, like an angel from heaven pirouetting
on the wind.
I sit sipping sadness, locked in solemn
stillness, frozen in shyness, as I watch her
and wonder if today is the day I make my
play? While the love songs on the jukebox
hit their lethal mark, shooting arrows
through my heart.


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Rex Sexton is a Surrealist painter exhibiting in Philadelphia and Chicago. His stories and poems have been published in Mobius, The Poetry Magazine, Willow Review, and Edge, recent fiction in Saranac Review, The Long Story, Straylight, Left Curve, Art Times, and Foliate Oak.