Tag: prose poetry

Ghosts of the American East by Jerry Wemple

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Ghosts of the American East

Market Street’s broad and unbothered sidewalks were meant for those who traversed here long ago. Not now. The A&P closed decades back. Jeweler, corner drugstore, and the other drugstore with the soda fountain all absent. And the cobbler man whose skinny storefront window displayed a silver machine with a rotating drum from which he’d dispense hot peanuts in a paper sack. All now spectral presences only some can see. I was a specter back then. I believed only some could see me. Most animals could: The stray dog wandering the alley. Thick-furred winter rabbits scavenging beneath the backyard bird feeder or huddled under the pines along the fence. The guinea pigs, scuttling amongst the wood shavings in their glass containers at the Woolworth store downtown, could see me as I pressed my face close, looked into their dark metallic eyes. I thought the lady who worked in the sewing and notions section could not see me as she shuffled past, but once she said excuse me as she pushed a wobble-wheeled cart down a cramped aisle.

Two dark-eyed brothers, teenagers, were able to see me and did not like it. I was returning from the candy store where the candy store man only saw me when I was with others, usually a cousin or some other kid. When I was by myself, he’d appear from behind the backroom curtain and disappear behind it again, like he was mistaken, the bell above the door hadn’t rung, I wasn’t fixed before the candy case, a coin clasped in anticipation. I knew then I contained ghost magic because I made sound silent, became invisible in lighted rooms. But those brothers saw me, and chunked sharp words and rocks at me. Some of the words I’d not heard before but understood their meanings. The boys’ faces contorted with jeers. They looked like the television news. I gathered a ripe handful of those rocks and put them in my pocket.

Sometimes I saw others who most did not. I saw a shadow man trail the son of the next-door neighbors six months after he’d returned from war. The shadow man followed him as he walked toward downtown, as he walked toward the bridge, as he walked toward the mill employment office. The shadow man said nothing, said to say nothing. Down at the south end of town where the dam goes across the river, the faint image of a boy bobbed about in the choppy current. His body washed up near the Fishers Ferry landing the summer before. An older cousin died in a motorcycle wreck. I saw him only once, thin as mist, walking at the edge of the woods near the state highway, his head twisted as though he was looking for something.

Mostly that has passed. More people can see me now, can hear me. That’s okay. I talk to them and they to me. The world is different these days. Or so it seems and doesn’t seem, oddly both at once. Still my renegade spirit sees more: my great-grandfather, dead over sixty years, waits in a chair on his porch for me to return from the corner store with a paper sack of red licorice whips. He speaks grumbly German to his wife through an open kitchen window, and they both laugh a little. My mother, passed on before my son turned two, makes her way to bingo at Saint Luke’s parish hall remembering aloud that she was one call away from last week’s jackpot. I try to reconcile these disparate worlds: the one we are in and the one we will join. Now and then I talk things over with Dempsey, my great-grandfather times many. Mostly I do it on walks down by the river with one of the dogs. Dempsey navigates a world where his White father gives him freedom yet sells away his Black mother, where he works to buy his wife, a Congo woman, property of a Huguenot planter who factors the loss of offspring into the price which costs Dempsey months, years. Dempsey tells me not to fret. That I know how the story ends. He eventually bought a mill and died in his sleep with credits in his accounts. I should tend to my own time, he tells me. I understand. Some days I reach in my pocket, then chuck a stone into the rolling water, watch the stone and then its ripples disappear. For now, small gestures like this are the best I can do.

*

Jerry Wemple is the author of four poetry collections, most recently We Always Wondered What Become of You from Broadstone Books. He co-edited, with Marjorie Maddox, the poetry anthologies Common Wealth and Keystone Poetry, both from Penn State Press. He also co-edited, with AD Stuart, Rivers, Ridges, and Valleys: Essays on Rural Pennsylvania from Catamount Press.

Two Poems by Ethan Mershon

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the stars

at the drive-in we were playing with decades, not like playing with fire,
but with what fire leaves behind. but there, in that tan van, we three
sat in the trunk with the door flung open over our heads, and fire played with me,
i wanted to kiss both of the girls i was with, although one had a long-distance boyfriend,
and the other was so christian it made my teeth hurt. i didn’t want a beer
i wanted eight beers and to turn back the clock. business as usual.
when the movie ended the christian girl drove us back to Grand Rapids
along a highway with no other cars on it. then she turned off the headlights.
we couldn’t see the road in front of us. we were alone in the world.
i was going to tell her to stop being crazy, to turn the lights back on,
suddenly i had a lot to live for, but then i looked out my window
and there they were.

*

seeker

i am standing in the back of a small church in Wichita,
son of a pastor, lapsed worship leader, holding
a styrofoam cup of coffee with the steam rising up
like i do when i go my anonymous meetings, and
the congregation is singing Amazing Grace, which
i haven’t heard in five years, which i once sung for
the inauguration of the president of my university,
who i didn’t like. the sum of the congregation’s voices
fills the chapel, pressing up against the stained glass
windows and the bread and grape juice at the front,
music getting in the body and the blood like a virus
or a crush, and i remember when me and my sisters
would sneak the communion bread away from the altar
after the service and eat it in the parking lot, children
who were so blessed they didn’t know they were blessed,
and as the song ends i feel like i should be crying,
but i’m not, i sit down among all these people i don’t
want to be friends with, and hope they have found
what they are looking for, because i will have to look
again.

*

Ethan Mershon is a poet living in Wichita, Kansas. His work has appeared in: Meridian, Fourth River, The Paris-American, and other journals.

Hunger by Valerie Bacharach

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Hunger

Years ago, shortly after our younger son died, my husband and I, on a trip to D.C., visited the National Gallery. Caravaggio and Monet vied for wall space with Klimt and O’Keefe while other rooms held marble statues and religious icons. We pretended to look, to scan the commentaries,
pretended we set aside sadness, left grief on the hotel’s unmade bed. My eyes wandered to families with bored teenagers, with toddlers sliding on tiled floors, tugging a parent’s hand, standing too close to a painting. Our son was neither toddler nor teenager, but a man of 26. Once upon a time, before we moved into darkness, we brought our sons here, ran after them, bribed them with treats, tried to speak with them about old masterpieces. I stared at those families surrounding us, fencing us in with their happiness, followed them from room to room, hollowed with a hunger so huge it could swallow the heavens.

*

Valerie Bacharach lives in Pittsburgh, PA and is a proud member of Carlow University’s Madwomen in the Attic Workshops. She received her MFA from Carlow University in 2020. Her book, Last Glimpse, was published by Broadstone Books in August 2024. She has been nominated for three Pushcart Prizes and two Best of the Net.

The Translucent Mother by Lara Payne

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The Translucent Mother

That night I thought you were dead I didn’t think once about your ghost, or worry you would haunt me. Of all I did not do for you. Of all you did not do for me. The police used the photo I gave them, found you bloody toed and confused. The next day you told me you don’t know how you wandered for 12 hours, never once asking for help. Am I kind to strangers because of you and your illness? Your ease of disappearance. I suckled 6 weeks, you told me once, so you knew you’d never get cancer. I’m used to your magical thinking, and barely argued. To what point? Perhaps I don’t need to imagine your ghost, as your presence has always been a bit translucent. Easily blown by any wind. Your voice changing cadence with each new friend or love. Chameleon. My first love, my first loss. The person I try every day to both love and be nothing like. Mother, half gone. Mother disappeared.

*

Lara Payne lives in Maryland. Once an archeologist, she now teaches writing at the college level, to veterans, and to small children. Her poems, many of which explore the Chesapeake environment and people, have appeared in a museum, on buses, and in print and online journals. Recent poems have appeared in Gargoyle and online with SWWIM Daily.

Three Poems by Howie Good

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A Dog’s Life

What I remember happening probably didn’t happen quite as I remember it. I was only 4, maybe 5, playing with toy cars and trucks on the sidewalk. A stray dog – a big, brutish German shepherd mix – appeared out of nowhere. They say dogs can sense fear. That frightening dog sensed mine. It snarled from deep within its Nazi guard dog heritage and then snapped at my face. Everything went black. The next thing I remember is mom, a kid herself, scooping me up in her arms and staggering down the street covered in my blood. Time is a funny thing. Seventy years later, in the dark gray of a winter twilight, I pull against my collar, a dog on a chain.

*

Wedding Song

The most popular wedding song in the spring of 1973 was “We’ve Only Just Begun (White Lace and Promises)” by the brother-sister duo, The Carpenters. Its sentimental lyrics set to a simple melody appealed to both the soft of heart and the soft in the head. Our wedding song was Simon and Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” Although we were young – just 21 – we were old enough to realize white lace can yellow and fray and promises be broken. Call it cosmic pessimism if you want; philosophers do. So much that exists exists in contradiction. The moon shines despite being barren rock, and in Alabama frozen embryos are considered children.

*

New World Order

It’s the belated end of the American Century. You can hear the slow, monotonous ticking of the cooling engine. A self-proclaimed king and his coterie of sociopaths have recast the culture in their own distorted image without so much as a “pardon me.” The lamp beside the golden door has been extinguished. Human bones are used in soups. Breathing is frequently a struggle. A fine black thread of anxiety runs through everything. I cope, but just barely, and only by exceeding the maximum daily recommended dosage. My face, with its worry lines and age wrinkles, is like a signed confession. Some things are crimes even if the cops don’t have to be called.

*

Howie Good is a widely published but little-known author. His latest poetry collection, True Crime, is due out in March from Sacred Parasite.

Two Poems by Howie Good

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Au Courant

Just because I smile doesn’t mean I am happy. “All of life,” Buddha said, “is sadness.” Birds return from the hot countries full of excited chatter, unaware the Doomsday Clock has crept even closer to midnight. I keep up with the headlines as much as a person can and still remain sane. Minds have corroded, splintered, flamed out. For every opinion shared in the blogosphere, there is an equal and opposite opinion. I hope for truth to recover its legendary authority. Meanwhile, a tomato is also a child’s balloon.

*

Shadows and Ghosts

The CT scan machine is shaped like a donut. I am lying inside the hole of the donut on my back. Bugs lie on their backs when they are dying. I was injected only moments earlier with a special dye. A burning sensation immediately spread through my body. Now the machine, with a brilliant flash of light, scans my torso for new tumors. In an adjacent room, techs are monitoring the images on a screen. They see shadows and ghosts. They see mounds of rubble. They see the screams trapped in my lungs.

*

Howie Good’s latest poetry book, True Crime, is scheduled to be published by Sacred Parasite in early 2026.

Two Poems by John Amen

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Hide & Seek

I was the golden boy. I bolted for the woods, running through ferns, past the sycamores, hiding behind the well-shed. The birthday song faded, my parents boarded their boat, leaving for a new life across the ocean. When I emerged, I was no longer the golden boy & my friend, who was supposed to be looking for me, had given up, married, he had children, grandchildren, houses scattered across the globe. Our lawn had turned brown, the roof was heavy with moss, our driveway littered with mannequins & car parts. I watched the Uber driver as he hauled the roast into the cul de sac. I stabbed it with my Swiss army knife until it stopped howling. That red juice flowed across the pavement, neighborhood, the county. I waited for the moon to appear, but no one was working the strings, at least that day, & like a train that’s leapt its rails, the night just never arrived.

*

FMJ

It happened again by the diamond highway. A satyr wearing a Budweiser cap put a bullet through a windshield & disappeared into the sunlight. Police arrived, dogs sniffed the tarmac, detectives found a casing with an inscription that read love is salvation. The highway was barricaded, cars & trucks backed up to the Standalone Gulf. Someone said, we’re in a loop here & smiled a terrifying smile. The day of the funeral in Chicago / in Manhattan / in Omaha a million people flooded a Zoom call, chanting until the FBI wrapped a trailer in Musgrove, a kidnapped baby sobbing on the back porch. The satyr in the Budweiser cap sang “Amazing Grace” through a bullhorn, then turned himself in. At the trial, he waved his beautiful hooves, declaring he’d heard voices in the forsythia, his angels ordering him to spread the holy word. An hour later the judge lowered his gavel, a long sigh unrolled through the city. The satyr’s hind legs were chained, his horns pared to a nub. A bailiff dragged him from the courtroom, mane shimmering, teeth bared for the folks back home. Someone said that night & that night only, they could see every star in the universe.

*

John Amen is the author of five collections of poetry, including Illusion of an Overwhelm, finalist for the 2018 Brockman-Campbell Award, and work from which was chosen as a finalist for the 2018 Dana Award. He was the recipient of the 2021 Jack Grapes Poetry Prize and the 2024 Susan Laughter Myers Fellowship. His poems and prose have appeared recently in Rattle, Prairie Schooner, American Literary Review, and Tupelo Quarterly, and his poetry has been translated into Spanish, French, Hungarian, Korean, and Hebrew. He founded and is managing editor of Pedestal Magazine. His new collection, Dark Souvenirs, was released by NYQ Books in May 2024.

1986 in a Small Town in Ohio by Shuly Xóchitl Cawood

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1986 in a Small Town in Ohio
We cruised, riding around in someone’s older Civic, or borrowing a parent’s Impala, or taking the beater that was on the verge of breaking down or rattled or needed a muffler but why bother now? We drove by the home of every boy we liked. It never took us long, a mile to East Enon Road, a mile to Fairfield Pike, through the few neighborhoods—IGA Land, College streets, the houses near Ellis Pond. We cruised by Ha Ha’s Pizza and Ye Olde Trail Tavern but mostly by the arcade where boys let quarters fall out of their pockets, and sometimes we joined them but often we tired of playing Ms. Pac-Man and wanted something more, something else, and we drove to Young’s Jersey Dairy where they sold day-old donuts after midnight and we squeezed into those red vinyl booths, and the boys would be there, the girls would be there, and we would buy Diet Coke and stay out late and eat day-old anything and carry whatever this was into our futures, some of us leaving home and never coming back, some of us going to college and working summers at Glen Helen or Carol’s Kitchen or washing dishes at The Wind’s, some of us never going far in the first place. But before the future, it was boys we longed for, boys we wanted to notice us, boys we wanted to change our lives—so much happens and never once happens in a small town—and death would come early to two of us and shift all the trees on Mills Lawn and none of us would take Route 68 to Xenia at night anymore, yet we still thought we would always have more of them—these days that back then never sped up, only slowed down, and in all the years we cruised, we never spotted one boy we liked through any house or apartment window, but we talked for hours about what might happen if we did, and we rolled down windows and the smell of seasons blew into the car, and we knew it, all of it—what was and what never would be—and our imaginations ran ahead of the car and behind it as we held in our breath and sped toward the edge of town and tomorrow, turning up the radio, ready to arrive.
*
Shuly Xóchitl Cawood teaches writing workshops, doodles with watercolors and metallic markers, and is raising two poodles and a dwindling number of orchids. She is the author of six books, including Something So Good It Can Never Be Enough (Press 53, 2023) and Trouble Can Be So Beautiful at the Beginning (Mercer University Press, 2021), winner of the Adrienne Bond Award for Poetry. Her work has been published in The New York Times, The Sun, and Rattle. Learn more at shulycawood.com.

Artillery Shelling by Laura Daniels

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Artillery Shelling

The Picatinny Arsenal is an American military research and manufacturing facility located on 6,400 acres of land in Morris County, New Jersey, United States.
          —Public Relations Manager for Picatinny Arsenal, U.S. Military

“(the) Picatinny portfolio comprises nearly 90 percent of the Army’s lethality and all conventional ammunition for joint warfighters.” What the hell does this even mean? The website goes on to explain the type of products tested: IED defeat technologies; small, medium, and large caliber conventional ammunition; precision-guided munitions; mortars; fire control systems; small-arms weapon systems; howitzers; gunner protection armor; warheads; fuzes; insensitive munitions. This list of products adds to my confusion. I thought they only tested small ammunition. My home is five miles from Picatinny. My town sends out this email almost daily: Please note that Picatinny Arsenal will be blast testing today from 9 am-3:30 pm. Also note that testing is conducted in 8–10-minute intervals. The testing comes grouped as three blasts at a time: the first shell fires… Boom… then a short pause… the second shell fires… Boom… then a short pause… the third shell fires… Boom… then an 8–10-minute interval until the next testing round begins. Testing—only testing—I remind myself—as the floor vibrates—and the windows rattle.

*

Laura Daniels (she/her) is a multi-genre writer. Founder of the Facebook blog The Fringe 999 and editor of The Fringe 999 Poetry Forum. Curated recently in New Jersey Bards Anthology, Silver Birch Press, Journal of New Jersey Poets, Smarty Pants Magazine for Kids, and featured poet for Poetry for Mental Health. Her poetry collection Gentle Grasp (Kelsay Books) is forthcoming in 2025. Her poems grow from a love of wandering and New Jersey, where she lives with her partner in Mt Arlington and works in the community garden. She can be reached at https://lauradanielswriter.wordpress.com and @thefringe999.

Anthropology 101 by Susana H. Case

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Anthropology 101

Our professor, red-eyed, disheveled, blew her nose, announced to the class that her good friend—lover, I thought—charged with murdering his wife, and without an alibi, had just been found not guilty. The verdict, the professor was adamant, forgotten ethnographic text in hand, restored her confidence in criminal justice. Students nodded, closed their notebooks, looked up again when she admitted her certainty that he’d done it. Something roiling in him, she told us, whenever he talked about his marriage. I believed she was right: he probably did do it, femicide having such an intimate face. She told us it was a good thing a jury had erred on the side of innocence. Then she brushed her hair and applied red lipstick. We opened our books to the Ituri forest people, how these short-statured men climb more than 100 feet into the canopy to collect honey from the bees, the product they most prize.

*

Susana H. Case is the award-winning author of nine books of poetry, most recently, If This Isn’t Love, Broadstone Books, 2023 and co-editor with Margo Taft Stever of I Wanna Be Loved by You: Poems on Marilyn Monroe, Milk & Cake Press, 2022. The first of her five chapbooks, The Scottish Café, Slapering Hol Press, was re-released in an English-Polish version, Kawiarnia Szkocka by Opole University Press and is forthcoming as an English-Ukrainian edition. Case is currently a co-editor of Slapering Hol Press. susanahcase.com

Two Poems by Howie Good

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The Sincere Assassin

The world burned without being consumed. Other people were just shadows. I passed a woman on the street I only later realized might have once been somebody. God’s face would appear and then disappear and then reappear among drifting clouds, playing peek-a-boo with the abandoned babies shrieking on the ground. My phone rattled. I thought I was about to learn the secret of how clowns get inside very small cars in very large numbers. The message was that I had cancer.

                                                            &

Outside the entrance to the Cancer Center, a woman with pale, stringy hair and puffy eyes stands morosely contemplating her phone and smoking a cigarette. Inside, the chatter is all about a sincere assassin with a head like a Donatello angel’s. I’m enthralled and terrified when I catch sight of him stepping off the elevator into the main lobby, and while there’s no actual law against his presence, that doesn’t mean it isn’t a kind of crime. Only if you have ever seen for yourself his dark hands sparkle can you truly judge.

                                                            &

It’s hard to remember a time when I haven’t received radiation, lying face down and naked to the waist on a pallet and required to remain as still as a corpse while the massive appendages of a monstrously large and powerful X-ray machine, a linear accelerator, sweep invisible killing beams over me, and there’s nobody I can ask, “Who allowed this to happen? Who’s to blame?” but even if there was, they wouldn’t know, and I would submit to the cold ministrations of the machine anyway, my nothing life, for all its startling inconsequence, worth the anguish of living.

*

Pilgrim’s Progress

At the far end of the street, I found the door I had been told would be there and passed through it. My bones crunched and rattled with each step, and my eyeballs bounced in their sockets. The ground itself began to dance. Gravestones fell over and smashed. The messiah appeared like a parade float overhead. Those who had once waited in expectation of his coming were gone by then, some grown tired and disaffected, but others made into lamp shades.

                                                            &

Deadly new diseases had emerged now that weather operated without regard to the season. Even souls had a kind of leaf blight. The overflow of corpses from funeral homes and cemeteries were stacked on sidewalks. And the dead were all so young. I almost cried out, “I don’t belong here, I don’t!” Special points of interest represented by triangles on tourist maps turned out to actually be just triangles.

                                                            &

When I arrived back home, no one was there, though the radio was playing in the kitchen, tuned to a classical music station, Glenn Gould interviewing Glenn Gould about Glenn Gould. Reminder notes were stuck to walls and doors and tucked in the frames of mirrors. “The weasels are not in the sky” was cryptically written on one. I climbed the stairs, undressed, and fell exhausted into bed. I may have slept or I may have just thought I did, drifting on the treacherous surface of a vast emptiness and everyone everywhere dying by their own hand.

*

Howie Good’s newest book, Frowny Face, a synergistic mix of his prose poetry and handmade collages, is forthcoming from Redhawk Publications.

Two Poems by Jennifer R. Edwards

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Watching Wolverine (Again) with my Second Husband

Only here, I admit I still double-take mildly muscular men in filthy wife-beater tank tops. I’m a sucker for dark, deep sideburns; those coursing creeks into a cool river mouth. Though I love a silver fox or shaved head hiding a historic hairline receding too soon, it’s the random spike that makes me want every angle of light. Cowlicks random & irreverent, the sheen of a day’s exhausting desire. Some consistent curiosity in me, watching, still & oblivious, as if every story loops to some evident ending. Those hands massive & metal glinting so beautifully unbroken. Not every story is chronological, but they’re linked & lovely with loneliness, the entering of an endless forest, a hardened man pushing back the gross overgrowth creeping along a barely visible path. There is something to be said for gravel-voiced men with animal instincts, finding me by impulse alone despite my awkward pains to cover every track. I’m there too, riding shotgun in an old, freezing car on a desolate shit-town road with a man saying you’re finally safe. I’m there asking what I should have, what I still need to know: when the claws come out, does it hurt? I still love him; how he answers like a can coming down, like a phone finding the wall, like the sun punishing the snow, saying every time. Oh, beautiful brawler, I thought there was heroism in desire. I confuse eagerness & appetite. Wanting won’t ever be enough. You don’t know your body is a weapon. Some genetic codes can’t be removed or rewired. Your healing is pure mutation.

*

The Well-Published Writer Doing My Tarot Reading Says It’s Harvest Time
         For C.J. Hauser and my Colgate crew

What grows best is what lets me baby it. It’s true, I’m not good at pruning or reducing. Lately, I’m deducing it’s OK things leave me. I love what lets me clip & hover & rearrange & putter. I admit, I have favorites but it’s every individual person & plant & animal at some point. How is it something or someone knows you? The proof: three iconic pictures of wheat & judgment & a man with a wand & world on his back. She tells me to be kinder to myself & my work is in fruition though there’s more ahead. The third card is different & it’s true my attention wanes & maybe that’s the whole point. I don’t really get it. She can’t exactly summarize. The bountiful sun is limited but still full for its dwindling time. Lately, I wonder what won’t survive me; clipping plants two nodes up from the end because it helps the roots. Growth is always starting & startling. Anyone who says they don’t have favorites is lying. I was lying when I started this, thinking things grow because of what I give. It might always find its own simple stretch toward light.

*

Jennifer R. Edwards (Unsymmetrical Body, Finishing Line Press, 2022) won the 2022 New England Poetry Club Amy Lowell Prize. Her poems have received Pushcart nomination, support from Palm Beach Poetry Festival and Colgate Writers Conference, and appear in many anthologies and literary magazines recently including Mom Egg Review, Gyroscope Review, Passengers Journal, Terrain, Literary Mama, and Snapdragon. She’s a speech-language pathologist in Concord, NH, residing with her family and pug. Twitter @Jennife00420145, Instagram Jenedwards8 https://linktr.ee/JenEdwards

Two Prose Poems by Howie Good

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The Visitation

I heard a massive thump. Alarmed, I went to the sliding glass door and looked out, expecting to see a seagull lying there dead after crashing into the glass. Instead, a juvenile sand shark was flailing on the back deck. I couldn’t have been more astonished if I’d been visited by an angel clothed in light or a neighbor wearing no clothes at all. The shark was just a foot long and battleship gray. As it thrashed about, I called to my wife, “Barbara, quick, bring a bucket!” I half-filled the bucket from the hose. Then Barbara, using a gardening trowel, managed to drop the shark into the bucket. This is the world. Whatever the hour, there’s always a rendezvous going on.

*

Murderers on Holiday

I was born with holes in me. “These things happen,” the doctor told my mom with a resigned smile. I can’t visualize the love of our fellow man that the Bible preaches with the detail that I can baseball on the radio. If there were actually angels, would they fly in a V-formation like geese, you think? Crows can hold a grudge for a year or more against someone who has mistreated them. No one should feel particularly safe. I love cats, but even a cat, when it’s starving, could eat a person.

*

Howie Good’s latest poetry collection, THE HORSES WERE BEAUTIFUL, is forthcoming from Grey Book Press.

ESP by Ed Nichols

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My friend said, “You need to be a believer in extrasensory
perception. I know things before they happen.” I cried into my
phone. “I don’t want to know the future. Or something that
happens on the other side of the world.”

I dozed off in my lawn chair. Not needing to know things
yet to happen. Blue sky lay over the farm. Cows munched
grass…dogs napped. Life was beautiful. Why question? Worry not
about such happenings…things to be determined tomorrow, or
next week, or next year, or never?

Smell of cornbread drifted over me. Understanding what I
am…what I believe, brought a tear to my one good eye. Always
best to not know when a terrible thing will occur.
*
*
*

Ed Nichols lives on Lake Oconee, Georgia. He is a journalism graduate from the University of Georgia, and is an award-winning writer from Southeastern Writer’s Association. He has had many short stories published, online and in print. In 2020 he started publishing his prose poems. He is currently working on a collection of his southern short stories.