Happy St. Paddy’s Day by Dan Carpenter I remember it best as the best of excuses for cutting class and getting drunk and kidding yourself that you looked as good to the girls shedding their winter pelts and inhibitions as they looked to you; that their green tongues said go. It came to reside, with New Year’s Eve, in that locked upstairs room of the mind and heart kept by the loved ones of alcoholics; misshapen mockery of faith, flag and sex, lost youth leering beneath a green plastic derby. With you in my March, I open again to the phony sodden clamor, extend my thousand Irish welcomes to the daytime drunks, the knob-kneed parochial step dancers, the corsaged politicians, all the flaunters of the color the singer reminds us my ancestors wore at the risk of their shabby lives. With you in my retreat, across the miles, as they say, I say to them, Yes, you are, all of you, please, be Irish for one afternoon, herded away downtown, insane and innocent of Yeats, of...
Flying Island is the Online Literary Journal of the Indiana Writers Center, accepting submissions from Midwest residents and those with significant ties to the Midwest.