I held a bottle of cheap vodka<\/p>\n\n\n\n
inside the Charleston liquor store<\/p>\n\n\n\n
on a Sunday morning in May.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Ahead of me:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
standing cockeyed,<\/p>\n\n\n\n
a young, red-haired man,<\/p>\n\n\n\n
stringy red beard,<\/p>\n\n\n\n
camouflage clothing,<\/p>\n\n\n\n
backwards ball cap,<\/p>\n\n\n\n
drinking a Monster,<\/p>\n\n\n\n
most of his teeth missing,<\/p>\n\n\n\n
mangling an American dialect,<\/p>\n\n\n\n
spinning a yarn to the clerks<\/p>\n\n\n\n
with bored faces behind the counter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He’d bagged a black bear last night,<\/p>\n\n\n\n
at dusk,<\/p>\n\n\n\n
before the spring season<\/p>\n\n\n\n
closed at midnight.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A wild boar then appeared,<\/p>\n\n\n\n
charged him,<\/p>\n\n\n\n
and he shot that motherfucker, too!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
(There are no feral swine on the Oregon Coast.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He’d be canning the bear later.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It made great taco meat.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
His kids were in the truck<\/p>\n\n\n\n
fiddling on phones,<\/p>\n\n\n\n
giggling.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He wasn’t buying booze,<\/p>\n\n\n\n
just beef jerky for his girls.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He had to hurry or they’d be<\/p>\n\n\n\n
late for church and miss a<\/p>\n\n\n\n
modern evangelical take<\/p>\n\n\n\n
on the Sermon on The Mount<\/p>\n\n\n\n
that omits practicing everything Jesus preached.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Minutes earlier:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
vultures commanding a secret cove<\/p>\n\n\n\n
perched in black snags,<\/p>\n\n\n\n
sea stars shining at low tide,<\/p>\n\n\n\n
herons spearing fish in tide pools,<\/p>\n\n\n\n
pelicans tumbling into waves<\/p>\n\n\n\n
like ordnance dropped from a benign bomber,<\/p>\n\n\n\n
my driftwood fort solid and evanescent,<\/p>\n\n\n\n
the ocean rolling the color of pool table’s felt<\/p>\n\n\n\n
left outside on the Oregon Coast for 30 years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
(There is such a pool table rotting in a field near Nehalem.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And heard a story of influencers desecrating a tribal burial site<\/p>\n\n\n\n
located on a rock where an abandoned lighthouse<\/p>\n\n\n\n
stood 500 yards away.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I had written that <\/em>poem before leaving the beach,<\/p>\n\n\n\n but it vanished standing in line<\/p>\n\n\n\n behind the Bear Hunter.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I held a bottle of cheap vodka inside the Charleston liquor store on a Sunday morning in May. Ahead of me: standing cockeyed, a young, red-haired man, stringy red beard, camouflage clothing, backwards ball cap, drinking a Monster, most of his teeth missing, mangling an American dialect, spinning a yarn to the clerks with bored […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9856,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,42],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9855","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-meditations","category-poetry","has-post-title","has-post-date","has-post-category","has-post-tag","has-post-comment","has-post-author",""],"builder_content":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9855","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9855"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9855\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9858,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9855\/revisions\/9858"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9856"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9855"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9855"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9855"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}