Last beer in a bar the one right by my place the end of 76th street before the shoreway they’re closing early tonight and will be for a while how long we’re not sure the bartender was talking about getting paid with one of the fry cooks about when they’d get their last checks and I honestly didn’t feel great most of the day from a late night and after I woke up I laid in bed for a while and then stumbled through a run my fifth of the week and now I’m sipping a brew listening to the way Cleveland people mention tragedy with a drink in hand cracking stale jokes about their lives collapsing, sounds surreal but these are browns fans who flood the streets in twenty degrees screaming with each other at a team that never wins people that realized a long time ago that maybe the definition of winning isn’t the same as everywhere else maybe winning is living and continuing to live and that sounds rudimentary but it’s true and a week old soccer game was on TV, people would look up at it sometimes forgetting what it was and I took a picture of the last beer and then twenty minutes later realized it wouldn’t be the last but the second to last one.
Matthew Dettmer is a physician living and working in Cleveland. He has been an active member of Literary Cleveland since 2018.
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Literary Cleveland is a nonprofit organization and creative writing center that empowers people to explore other voices and discover their own. Through an expanding roster of multi-level classes, workshops and events, Literary Cleveland assists writers and readers at all stages of development, promotes new and existing literature of the highest quality, and advances Northeast Ohio as a vital center of diverse voices and visions.
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