Highways and Byways: The Night My Sister Was Born

By Maik Strosahl

Unlike “Irises across the Floor,” this one draws more from experience. My grandfather, I am told, was a very active person before I was born, but he was also in a lot of pain. He decided at some point he would do everything he wanted to do (hunting, fishing, bowling, etc.) in the year after he retired. After that, he spent the rest of his life sitting in his chair, drinking his Jim Beam and chain-smoking in front of the television. I was born about the same time he retired, so all I knew of him was the drunk who sometimes was funny, but many times was mean. I loved the man who called me “Michelle,” but wish there was more depth to our relationship and memories.


Johnny Carson is laughing
in the grayscale lights
extending from the ten-inch box,
rays reaching through
thick cigarette smoke,
across the dark paneled room
into his staring, yellow,
bloodshot whites.

You would swear him dead,
yet he rose during the commercials
after the ten o’clock news,
shuffling in his slippers
to the bathroom,
hurrying to piss away
pure Jim Beam sour mash
so he could get back
for the monologue.

I am on the couch,
trying to sleep,
but Ed McMahon’s laughter
and the fact that I cannot
breathe this haze
is keeping me awake.

Rolling my mouth into the pillow,
I cough –
quiet, muffled.

Grampa yells to
“Keep it down over there!”,
not even turning from the TV
as his arm blindly brings his whiskey
through the smoke
and up to his lips.

I wonder if sleep will ever come,
wonder about mom and dad,
my new baby sister,
and when we all can go home.

Johnny is doing Carnack,
but Grampa is not laughing.
The bottle rests,
the cigarette burns away
in the clay handprint
I made for him in school
and Grampa snores.

Copyright © 2020 by Maik Strosahl Michael E. Strosahl has focused on poetry for over twenty years, during which time he served a term as President of the Poetry Society of Indiana. He also dabbles in short fiction and may be onto some ideas for a novel. He relocated to Jefferson City, Missouri, in 2018 and currently co-hosts a writers group there. In September 2020, he started the blog “Disturbing the Pond.”