Peter Mladinic

SEVENTY-EIGHT DOLLARS

The late eighties. Since my
last visit home, you’d been on the jury
of a murder trial. A young
black man shot a black teenage boy
in a fast food restaurant
one night after the place had closed.
The man had been staking it out.
He entered through a back door
and ordered the girl employees
and the boy a cook to lie down.
He got seventy-eight dollars.
Before he fled he fired
two shots into the boy
who somehow phoned the hospital
but bled to death just when
the ambulance arrived. I don’t
know how the man was caught.
You said he had moved
recently from city slums
and that his mother
and father on the witness stand
were inarticulate, like they
weren’t aware of where they were
or of what was happening.
But the man had a brother
close to his age and this brother
was an executive for IBM.
You said it was strange
one was good, the other bad,
both having the same blood.
When the verdict was read
the one convicted of manslaughter
shouted obscenities, showed
no remorse. He was in prison.
You showed news clips
of the crime, the trial,
spread on your coffee table,
indelible in your mind.
You kept seeing the trial,
the family of the deceased,
the face of the killer. His name,
Alonso, was all I recalled.
And today, recalling your
account, I saw the kitchen
terrified eyes on brown
tiles drops of blood.


Peter's YouTube video reading of "Seventy-eight Dollars"


Peter confesses: "The source of this poem is an actual crime committed in New Jersey in the mid 1980s, I believe. A friend was on the jury for the trail, and he both told and showed news clippings about it. So it’s pretty much a crime poem that reflects a harsh reality."

PETER MLADINIC’s fifth book of poems, Voices from the Past, is due out in September 2023 from Better Than Starbucks Publications. An animal rights advocate, he lives in Hobbs, New Mexico, USA.