Myrna and Me

by Kenneth Pobo

I always considered her sophisticated. At 80, with Tareytons in a glass top hat, taking each one out as if it were a friend she hadn’t seen in a decade, she smoked with delight and effervescence. In my twenties, pretty much of a dummy, I loved Jesus and Nyquil. She said she had a nervous stomach. I had a nervous life. When she died, the nervous sky parted and she walked onto Heaven’s widest boulevard, tinted hair only slightly less red than a Tennessee sunset.

6S

Kenneth Pobo’s poetry chapbook, Trina and the Sky, won the 2009 Main Street Rag poetry chapbook contest. His fiction appears in: Galleon, Verbsap, Word Riot, Tonopah Review, Fiction at Work, and elsewhere.