War Memories
Barry Yeoman I remember a musty basement in my childhood, a naked light bulb illuminating a furnace, a small child's basketball and a little rim mounted on an old dusty cabinet used to store house paint. I shot basket after basket in that stark space bouncing the ball and shooting it through that little hoop. There was a washer and dryer that the ball bounced off of occasionally making a deep metal drum sound and there was a pile of dirty clothes and miscellaneous objects being stored in that little space which was my sanctuary where I shot and shot the ball over and over again. There were wooden steps leading upstairs to the kitchen of that little double we lived in on Warder Street. It was the 60's and I was just a child and everyone said PEACE and held up two fingers and I was told to stop doing that and the only thing I knew about Vietnam was from the combat clips on the evening news with Walter Cronkite. I was always told to leave the room though I could still hear machine gun fire and the reports of body counts. And it must have been winter because the black and white television threw ghostly dancing shadows on the dark walls and we all know exactly how that war turned out. |
About the author:
Barry Yeoman is originally from Springfield, Ohio and currently lives in London, Ohio. His work has appeared, or is forthcoming in Vagabonds Anthology, Futures Trading, Danse Macabre, Harbinger Asylum, Red Fez, Lost Coast Review, Crack the Spine, Burningword Literary Journal, Two Hawks Quarterly, Broad River Review, Soundings Review and The Rusty Nail, , among others. He was a finalist for the 2014 Rash Award in Poetry hosted by Broad River Review. You can read more of his published work here. |