Grant Clauser

Dare

Bored one hot July day
the summer his father died,
Billy and I dared who
could take the most bee stings,
so we collected ten each
in jam jars and held them
open-end to our arms, laughing
while the panicked bees crawled
inside the jars, refusing to sting.
So we gave up, then rummaged
through his dad’s garage
to make our own fireworks
looking for anything that read
flammable or explosive.
And we repeated variations
of this all summer until one day
Billy spun the cylinder
of his dad’s Colt revolver,
and dared us to take turns
pointing it at each other.
And for minutes we both
looked at it, growing huge
on the table between us,
asking where we thought
this was going.

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Grant Clauser’s sixth poetry book is Temporary Shelters from Cornerstone Press. His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Southern Review, Kenyon Review and other journals. He’s an editor for a news media company and teaches poetry at Rosemont College in Pennsylvania.