January 2025
Bio Note: I'm happily retired from nearly 40 years of teaching college writing, literature, and peace studies, and I write, hike, and cycle with my psychotherapist wife in and around the woods near Saugatuck, Michigan. My latest of ten collections are Mobius Trip and Flip Requiem (Dos Madres Press, 2021, 2020).
In the Blue Light of the Television
In October once, late evening,
after a long-weekend’s hideaway
where a lake had licked
his mind into submission
and a steady wind had advanced
the ancient dunes their micromillimeter,
he sat in the blue light of the television
and heard the words that numbed
then freed him to himself—
I’m leaving you—
and one of them said, “It will be for the best,”
neither yet knowing if it was the truth.
Originally published in Eclectica
A Summer Saturday
He woke up and got right to packing books
in the boxes he’d already collected (but who
gets what?) and threw together several odd
household items, his clothes into drawers
she’d decided would be his. One little boy
or another followed around to help, as best
he could, their oldest joining in to load up
the biggest things—a couch, an old table,
the extra bed—into the van, its back seats
taken out. By evening, everything had been
shifted the few short blocks, and after some
catch out back, he kissed each sweetest face
goodbye and staggered away: the deadening
ending to the second-worst day of his life.
Originally published in Lost Enough, Finishing Line Press
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