Stephen Barile

MONGE
For Steve Monge

He was a scrap metal man,
No ordinary man by any means,
Graduating from the garbage truck
To the scrapyard.
A hunter, fisherman, trapper,
He did it all, everything.
Something left over from World War Two
Made him a lifelong bachelor
With a fearful disdain for women.
Except his beloved sister.
Many didn’t know of his constant return
Over again, in his imagination
To his combat days in the Europe,
A soldier in the Battle of the Bulge,
While hunting deer near Courtwright Lake.
Grouse hunts at Rattlesnake Crossing,
In regions of the Sierra, east of his yard.
He was trapped in his dirty work clothes
Toting his thirty-ought-six rifle
With a scope--he was a trapper too.
Once inside the gate, you were trapped--
Take his offer or go somewhere else.
No matter the price of the metal,
He called it a good deal for you.
Every so often, he’d drive a truckload
Of metal to the yards in Los Angeles,
And prearranged deals for set prices.
In the office at the back of his yard,
Where he fried steak on a Coleman stove,
He paid cash for metal from a cash drawer
Welded on a pedestal, bolted to the floor. 
Behind the counter, an army-cot
With an unzipped flannel sleeping bag.
A .45 caliber automatic pistol
Kept ready for thieves on the bedside table.
There was no one in his life now
Just his sister whose home he bought with cash,
And someone he called his stepson,
Who stole from him regularly given a chance.
He enjoyed holiday dinners
being with her, sitting next to her,
The parts and pieces of his life scattered
On the oily ground with metal-scrap.
I expect, he died alone.

Stephen Barile, a Fresno, California native, attended Fresno City College, Fresno Pacific University, and California State University, Fresno, and taught writing at Madera Community College, and CSU Fresno. His poems have been anthologized and published widely in on-line and in print journals, including: The Broad River Review, Featured Poets, Haight-Ashbury Literary Journal, The Heartland Review, Ignatian, London Grip, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Mason Street Review, The Nelligan Review, New World Writing Quarterly, North Dakota Quarterly, The Opiate, OVUNQUE SIAMO, Pharos, Rio Grande Review, San Joaquin Review, Santa Clara Review, The Selkie, The Tiny Seed Literary Journal, Tower Poetry, Willawaw Journal.