Sean Dougherty
True Facts
It is snowing in late fall and my more than addled father-in-law is driving the lawnmower in ever smaller circles mulching the fallen leaves. It is snowing lightly and he looks ridiculous and somehow beautiful and nearly symphonic, fugue-like, going round and round, the leaves disappearing into tiny pieces, the snow falling but not sticking to the ground. The rider mower’s motor grumbles. The neighbors walk wave and laugh. One shouts out, you ride that better than a bull. Get it done! Soon my father-in-law will be driving in circles so small it will look as if he is spinning his tires, the way we used to spin our cars in closed supermarket parking lots, when we were young, making smoke, doing what we called donuts, impressing each other with our burning wheels. Then the police arrived and took our names, let us go if we kowtowed and apologized and used the words Officer and Sir. What did we know except of boredom and survival? Those years when so and so had overdosed, or so and so hung from a rope in his room, or so so got out on a scholarship or their wits. Curfews cut and the worst of us sent to the detention centers on the edge of town. Remember so and so who broke out and hitchhiked to the beach and partied till they caught him and dragged him back? Where the toughest of us learned there is always someone tougher, meaner, bigger. Or long before then when we spun bottles and kissed on the mouth. Kissed lightly as snow landing on the bare shoulders of a girl who draped her sweater down. The world was spinning slower then. The snow is falling deeper now and my father in law has disappeared. I look out the window worried. He is sitting on the lawnmower over by the garage. I have to squint to see him—why isn’t he coming in? Is something wrong? He head is titled skyward. Is he dead? Another stoke? Oh lord. I think to get my coat and run outside when I realize he is laughing. He is catching flakes of snow on his outstretched tongue.
The Big Man
There’s that movie with John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara that takes place in Ireland where they call him The Big Man. Today Garron this funny Irish comedian is complaining on reels about people calling him The Big Man this, the Big man that, and how he doesn’t say, well you the Bald man, or the big hairy man, or the wee tiny wheeny man. I’m thinking how The Big Man sounds so Irish, ah the Big Man, and of course picture Liam Neeson who is indeed a big man, but then I remember that was the name of Clarence Clemons the consummate rock saxophonist for the Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band. And Clarence with his mauve suits and his cool style, and those steady riffs, particularly his long solo on “Jungleland,” that sort of Kerouac like ode to the streets—for Springsteen had an ear to the streets, and Clarence, well his sound, that tone, sounded exactly like how the heart sounds standing under a streetlight, waiting for the man to arrive, or waiting for nothing in particular, in a place like Newark, or Jersey City, or Lowell Massachusetts where I used to drive, playing Springsteen through the joyous streets of Cambodian kids playing soccer on the sidewalks, and the sadness of fifteen year old girls calling out from doorways like shadows, or up through Lawrence, the Puerto Rican bodegas where we ate homemade empanadas and bowls of arroz con gandules, and then off to the social clubs to dance merengue or the best of us Salsa, searching perhaps for Rosalita herself. Because your poppa knows I don’t have any money, and us boys and girls, some Irish, white, black, and brown, speaking Slanglish, sauntering about, up to no good but nothing not too not good, and listening to the Big Man Clarence blowing that big old tone, golden toned, slow slurred, dressed in black, purple, or mauve, singing along. And the way he moved snapping his fingers, and the night we saw the E street band play all night down in Providence. Clarence passing the riffs to Bruce. Weinberg hitting those skins till his arms nearly fell off, and Bruce’s love it took him too long to acknowledge Patty Scalisi singing backup, singing along Federici’s keys, a band made of the Shore, of the dive bars where men did or did not work, of boardwalks and the endless arcades of youth, of single mothers, and lovers who would drive all night just to buy you a new pair of shoes, and so we drove home stoned feeling that much less alone, and knowing he had proved it all night. For the first time maybe we knew not to worry about the darkness there at the edge of town, for us, young living in those mill towns along the river, the muddy rivers, and the quarries we drove to on summer nights so hot and humid we thought we’d die—we dove in blindly into that dark water, head-first without looking.
We are Always Driving Headlong Into Things
Last night my wife drove my car into one of those metal rods that folks put up along their property line here up along Lake Erie. We get so many feet of snow it helps you to know where the sidewalk is and where the road ends. Only it wasn’t snowing last night, or even raining, just dark and my wife neglected to turn on the headlights because as she said, “Mine come on automatically.” She is always driving into things, or it is we are always driving into things, into a chain link fence last year. That was me, skidding on the black ice, or driving into the curb, or the talkie speaker stand at the Wendy’s drive-thru as she reached to get out her money. Or hell I almost drove into a biker wearing all black along Route 20, on a rainy night. What was he thinking? No reflector jacket, no lights to tell cars he was there. No, maybe he wanted someone to drive into him, or maybe he didn’t care. We risk our lives every time we leave the house, risk them when we run or walk, and God knows every woman with their mace or gun as they go out to run. Soon all child girls will be given a key ring with pepper spray and a bottle when they are born. And then when I was young we had the drive-in theaters, and all the drive-thrus started—the drive thus weddings, and the driveby shootings! One must duck or be sent to the drive-thru wake, and driven to the cemetery where finally you will be lowered. And then once more we will drive away. I drove away when my best friend died at seventeen, drowned in a quarry. I was just driving, with a new license, and I got into my old Ford Elite with the eight cylinder engine and I drove, drove fast, hitting over a hundred, not Staties in sight. I drove away from that mill town along the Merrimack river, drove fast till I reached the seacoast. Then I drove slow, along the boulevard and the boardwalk, past the arcades, and the boys and girls of summer, and the bars, and lovers under blankets on the beach, as the tide rolled in, as the tide ebbed. I drove back and forth as night fell, drove into barrels of trash, drove into a bike stand. I wasn’t drunk, but I wanted to see things smash, as the world has smashed into us, so young, not expecting one of us to die so soon. And yet that is what happens in this world, and so many of us crashed. Into walls, or buses, into the walls we could not see, and the walls of class as we drove though those gated towns, those towns of perfect white painted houses. We drove and so I kept on driving, far from there, far from the red brick mills, and the factories closing, from the bars where we drank our futures down in boilermakers and Canadian beer. Far from the ashes of our dead we scattered on the river banks or at the pier. But wherever I drove was just another town, another border, another chin-link fence, where the tall boys stood, staring hard, waiting to call next.
Copyright © February 2026 Sean Dougherty
Sean Thomas Dougherty’s (he, him) most recent book is Death Prefers the Minor Keys from BOA Editions. A longtime disability worker, he works as a Medtech and Carer along Lake Erie. His book The Second O of Sorrow (BOA) won the Housatonic Book Award and was cowinner of the Paterson Poetry Prize. His other awards include a Fulbright Lectureship to the Balkans and the James Hearst Poetry Prize from North American Review. His work has appeared in The New York Times Sunday Times, Kenyon Review, and forthcoming in Barrow Street, Brevity, Craft, and Poetry Ireland.