2025, Autumn, Ohio River Valley Literature, prose, Prose Poem

“He doesn’t even have an IPhone!”

The more I go on in the twenty-first century,  the more I want to go back to a landline and a typewriter. Every digital character becomes an attempt to insist myself into an alien realm. I distract myself in late August by pondering the changes in the greens of the leaves. Sometimes the difference is simply the way the light hits; sometimes it’s the chlorophyll leeching out of the leaves. But I like to notice the gradual draining into orange and red and yellow and brown, and that precise moment when the leaves wear their last green of the season.

Standard
2024, Autumn, Ohio River Valley Literature, poetry

Autumn Notes, 12 and 13

12.

i dream of rising waters after the storm
eyes open. the Appalachians sprout the season
wash colors down the valleys to the river

away

i dream of rising waters

13.

October is September scrubbed clean
in heavy rains
the wind coursed us here
to a cityscape glistening in bright decay
born out of fog someone reads as desperate

Standard
2023, Autumn, Ohio River Valley Literature, poetry, the no-scape, Working Class Literature

this grafting of the new age

anticipation sown in a man’s hip
takes root stretches out up down
this grafting of the new age
onto tired wood
while watching Fall leaves
pile up stripping bare tree limbs
the picture of a new season

Standard