The Continuing Story of Robert Johnson

In this life, he sops his plate with his wife’s biscuits,
gulps down creamed coffee over the morning tribune.
After the sports, he picks obituaries for old friends,
but they are gone and all that’s left: calloused
fingers, a scarred right side from a rusty blade,
and a burning ulcer—the gluttonous sins of booze
and hog knuckles. And don’t forget, the bellyful
of poison that lingers still.
                                                  But he doesn’t talk
of those things anymore. Only on nights
when the silence of life scrapes against his eardrums
and easy pour bourbon fills his fat gape,
he takes down his guitar, fingers the strings.
While he thumbs, old molting crows collect outside,
and his wife, weak, dips down low. As she sways,
she calls out, Daddy. His eager eyes follow
the seam of her dress ascending above her knees.
On those charged nights that he lays on top of her,
there is no blood as her teeth bite the fat of the palm
he holds to muffle her moans, Oh God, Oh God.






Click here to listen to William Lusk Coppage reading "The Continuing Story of Robert Johnson"






After serving in the United States Air Force, William Lusk Coppage completed his MFA in poetry from McNeese State University in Lake Charles, LA. He is originally from the Mississippi Delta, but now lives with his wife in Wilmington,NC where he teaches English at Cape Fear Community College. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Oxford American, Passages North, The Greensboro Review, and Cream City Review.