​Barroom Blues by Elizabeth Burk

To hell with deejays, 
live bands, crowded 
dance floors. On lonely nights, 
bourbon in hand,

I still love to hunker, 
over wide-bellied jukeboxes
tucked into dark corners
of back street bars, 

their squat legs perched 
on sawdust strewn floors,  
their gap-toothed grin, 
like a fat man waiting to be fed.

I flip through metal pages
in search of songs 
from the past—downbeat 
Doo-wop of the fifties,

Frankie Lyman wailing 
on that ancient question 
—why do fools fall in love--
the Platters, rumbling 

with the rhythm of sex, 
and Elvis, the king, 
high gloss, down dirty, singing, 
sobbing, turning us weak 

with desire, we wanted 
to be there, to live  
in that mysterious hotel 
called Heartbreak, 

to walk its bleak, 
seedy corridors until 
we learned it was not a place  
to reside forever.


Elizabeth Burk is a semi-retired psychologist and a native New Yorker who divides her time between her family in New York and a home and husband in southwest Louisiana. She is the author of three collections: Learning to Love Louisiana, Louisiana Purchase, and Duet: Poet & Photographer, a collaboration with her photographer husband. Her poems, prose pieces, and reviews have been published in various journals and anthologies including Atlanta Review, Rattle, Southern Poetry Anthology, Louisiana Literature, Passager, Pithead Chapel, PANK, One Art, and elsewhere. Her first full-length manuscript will be published in September 2024, by Texas Review Press.