MELTING-CUSTARD WORRIES DURING KENTUCKY CICADA SUMMERS

After slow Sunday-night church services

during 1950s' Kentucky cicada summers

and rolled-up rock-n-roll teen-jean jive,

my mom would drive us out for ice cream

twenty-five cents--15-cents for littler kids--

to get us a two-fisted frozen custard cone

too meltingly big for lickety-split small hands.

There was the Brown Derby chain

of frozen-custard stands, available in
my Cold-War hot-summer countryside

which dipped the cold cream-in-the-cone

in liquid chocolate, making a thin tectonic skin

that fractured and slid off creating a delightful
problem--Jim Dandy to the rescue!--
for a jively baseball-capped kid

while the grown-ups were fracturing themselves

over nuclear-custard Sputnik worries
of air raids, bomb shelters, and McCarthy Red-ism
 --The Warden said, hey, buddy,
don't you be no square!--
and spindly TVs and polio and the devilry
of hip-swiveling rock-n-roll--Be-bop-a-lula!--
but the jively baseball-capped kids
wanted Beethoven to roll over to make memories
for those dipped-chocolate frozen-custard
Kentucky cicada summer Sundays