Cooper Shea

Ages ago, when I was a kid and my grandfather got
bored with watching me, he’d say —
“Come on! We’re going
drinking with the Indians!”
Equipped with a 30-pack, we’d go to a guy named
Frankie Youngbear’s
green slab-
house so they could drink and play euchre.
“Indians,” he’d say “are
just like us but they were the land’s first people,
Kid.”
looking at them like a student looks at a
musty history textbook, I
never thought they were that different.
Only thing that stuck out was that we were
pale and they looked kinda sunburnt.
Quality booze was
rare for my grandfather, but
sometimes, they’d get a real nice bottle of
Teeling, this Irish whiskey that he loved. They could
usually drink it dry over two games, my grandfather
viciously condemning the government and what they did to the natives.
We’d leave when it started to get dark. The old man not
exactly walking straight from Frankie’s house, still
yelling that he was sorry about Wounded Knee and myself
zig-zagging with him back to our own, separate life.

COOPER SHEA is a poet from Iowa. He is a recent graduate from the University of Northern Iowa and contributed to the literary magazines Inner Weather, Periphery, and Sun and Sandstone. He’s just…he’s trying, man.