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Joanne Tracy
The perfectly good coffee I filter through the old pocket of my crown dress. A dress I found on the sidewalk. Gold crowns on a field of white. The lipstick stain on the collar matched the pink ribbons on the sleeves. The pocket is my last scrap from the day of crowns. Jack didn’t mean to tear the dress.
It was something to hold onto. That fricking
yellow school bus could have killed me. They
never watch out unless they’re driving
to some school and the street sign said Walk.
Jack was my savior, his breath in gusts on
my face, whiskey and smoke. His breath dried my eyes. “Hold onto me,” he said, and I
did, his arm steady as a tree limb. The crown pocket fits in the wire sieve I found in a fancy red garbage can and the sieve perches over my Campbell’s soup cup. The cup was full of nails when I moved in here. Seeds and tools and dirt like most sheds. Crown coffee is food. It’s all I need. Jack’s face floats in the coffee steam, the air I breathe, his face in my nose, mouth, and down my throat. I am full of him. His copper penny face. Indian blood, he said. My teapot whistles on the rusty camp stove. Rust is more copper. The more copper the better. My teapot whistles high and steamy like Jack’s concertina, Scarlet Soprani. Her notes live in the air. Jack’s hands, his square copper fingers pumped Scarlet’s lavender folds. Puffs of air that cooled me. Jack bought Scarlet back from Pawn Paradise on the day of crowns. I thought he was a preacher when he first played those fricking gospel songs, but his eyes said sailor or thief.
Joanne Tracy won a fiction fellowship from Literary Arts of Oregon in 2002. Jack’s Flag is the inspiration for her novel-in-progress, We Save Who We Can.
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