Ice Cream Parlor

by Terence Culleton

Across the room a woman brings
a straw up to her little boy’s lips, it’s
to help him get over a fall he’s had,

the jag-scrape on his knee, the shock
sustained as to a world he’ll soon
enough learn’s hardly ever kind.

The woman doesn’t have much
else to cheer him up with than
a chocolate milkshake and

the reasonable observation
that every boy loves chocolate. Grown-
ups too. Life’s thrust on us, a kind

of curse, back at which we curse, curse
against curse, nothing else, then there
is chocolate, smooth and cool, soft

words from softest lips as when
the body pours its rich sweet scar-milk
into a scratch, and soon there’s

germ-hunger in the blood’s cells,
the blood crusts up making a shield
to guard and help heal the wound.