BRENDAN McENTEE

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Altamont​​

He grinds the base of the bottle into the table,
feels the rasp between wood and glass in his knuckles.
 
It reminds him of the grit under his tires,
driving through the unlearned lessons of his country.
The bar would be a honky-tonk, if such things still existed:
the culture’s renamed them “dives,” as if it were an aspiration.
The skunk-weak smell of pot—no longer sacramental—drifts across the bar.
He looks at the neon beer sign fading above,
thinks of Meridith Hunter in his lime green suit, his life pulsing out
while the Stones played “Under My Thumb” up at the raceway decades ago.
The neon in the juke is steady, is really LED,
and the “Girl from North Country” is followed by “Rich Men
North of Richmond.” Everything that rises, he thinks.
He should leave, get back on the road. He orders another, 
keeps running the pebbled glass across the wood, maybe to make an impression.
 

Brendan McEntee is a writer and poet from Queens, NY. His work has appeared in The Iconoclast, Mad Swirl, Perigee, and A Prick of the Spindle, is anthologized in Tipping the Sacred Cow and Vintage, and will appear in upcoming issues of Connecticut River Review and Subterranean Blue Poetry. He was a founding member and editor of Triggerfish Critical Review and is on the reading board for NowCulture.​