| Pop Bottles, 1956 by John Sokol | ||
What a racket they made as they clinked and clanked in our wagon to the wump tha-wump of a funky wheel. We'd comb the ditches and drag the creek, pan the fields and scour dumps, and wherever we looked we'd stop on a dime for another nickel. By the end of summer diminishing returns had us waiting for workmen to finish their lunch. We'd trade-in their bottles for Mars bars and Fire Balls, Milky Ways and money. Once, down at the widest part of the Nimishillen, Jimmy Cook and his gang pushed my brother and me in the creek and ran off with our wagon full of bottles. We were already soaked and the sun was setting so we slogged through the creek until dark and found more bottles than we had before. By then, we were catching lightning bugs, and putting a few in every bottle. When we set them afloat, out on the water, we stood in the creek, and watched our blinking armada float away like money down the drain, and money well-spent. And when they docked in the harbor of a fallen tree — a hundred yards downstream — we laughed all the way to that Nimishillen bank. JOHN SOKOL is a writer and painter living in Akron, Ohio. His poems have appeared in America, Antigonish Review, The Berkeley Poetry Review, Georgetown Review, New Millennium Writings, The New York Quarterly, and Quarterly West, among others. His short stories have appeared in Akros, Descant, Mindscapes, The Pittsburgh Quarterly, Redbook, and other journals. One of his stories has been translated into Danish, and, another, into Russian. His drawings and paintings have been reproduced on more that thirty-five book covers. His chapbook,(click title) "Kissing the Bees," winner of the 1999 Redgreene Press Chapbook Competition, is available through Amazon.com.
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