Last Dance
by S.Y. Ball
Yancy dies ten months after asking me instead of a cool girl to dance.
Porkpie straw hat, honey brown skin, Tennessee drawl,
cousin of the kids throwing his going-away party.
Before shipping out to Vietnam, Yancy visits family and his father
who works on a gas pipeline outside of town.
Yancy touches my hand without demand, softly.
We Shotgun to Junior Walker, slow dance to Smokey Robinson. We talk.
My back bleeds from the daggers aimed from other girls’ eyes.
Yancy cuts like a diamond on glass in the memory of a teenage fat girl.
I find his name etched on The Wall in D.C., the official photo
of his baby face posted on-line, his death profiled by Army scribes.
Hostile small arms fire, died outright, body recovered. Age 20.
His cheated life, I still ask why he picked me.
S.Y. Ball is retired and working to finish her undergraduate degree after fifty years. Her poems have appeared in the Silver Birch Press Series One Good Memory and in the anthology Confluence from FootHills Publishing. She lives with her second husband in upstate New York. The Vietnam War shadowed her teenage years and her first marriage to an Air Force sergeant. They were stationed in Tokyo, Okinawa, and Taiwan during the last years of the war. Her poems “Last Dance”, “Shadow Dance”, and “Battle Dance” are her first attempt to write about her indirect but life-changing experiences of war.