Sunday, July 29, 2012

The Stone Wall



Way up Magazine Street,
that’s how you said it: way up
for up the river from downtown
and the French Quarter and actually
I think it was Tchoupitoulas Street, was
the place for bands and music, F&M Patio
(no one said Fump & Manny’s), where
no one checked for IDs for beer but
you had to show your driver’s license
for mixed drinks, until the night
of the police raid (someone forgot to pay
the monthly fee?) and we tossed
the drinks and I boosted my date up
the stone wall surrounding the patio
and pulled myself up after her and we
jumped to the other side fortunately there
were too many of us to chase down and
they forgot to cover the back of the place
and good thing too because my date
was the daughter of a federal marshal and
I wouldn’t have wanted to explain
to her daddy why he had to post bail so
we ran to my car and drove off through
flashing police lights and six blocks away
when we stopped being scared we
started laughing about how fast we climbed
that stone wall. F&M reopened a few weeks
later and we were back.

This is another poem in the series about growing up in the South (New Orleans, to be specific in this case), suggested by my friend Nancy Rosback at A Little Somethin’.

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