Category Archives: Working Class Literature

2024, Ohio River Valley Literature, prose, river life, Working Class Literature

from ‘the river north to South Point’ [And the congregation pushes on…]

11.03.24.1521 hrs

2nd cup of Coffee. 2 hrs 39 minutes until watch.

Standing on the back of the Broaddus, starboard, eating a bowl of Mate Matt Kemp’s made from scratch biscuits and gravy — the biscuit broken into pieces, the way a civilized person eats. We’re rolling northeast. The landscape  is hilly; we’re in the bottom of the Appalachian foothills. The sun is burning the last of the overnight chill out of my bones. The hum of the tug G Walker’s engines play in time with the sounds of our wake in a light breeze.

I know I am not one of the lords of the earth; but I am a happy river pebble being pushed along. These divine moments of peace are part of what makes this life the best I have ever lived.

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2024, Ohio River Valley Literature, poetry, river life, Working Class Literature

We breathe each other

Some nights after a cruise I will go to bed without taking a shower wearing the scent of the diesel and river on my skin. Though I try not to wake her, she mutters half-awake and pushes up next to me. We breathe each other in. She smells of ripe peaches and spring flowers. We fall asleep.

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2024, incomplete memoir, Ohio River Valley Literature, prose, Working Class Literature

I used to haunt coffee shops

I used to haunt coffee shops. When that was a thing. One of those spirits armed with a book, a notebook, a pen.  I’d hardly speak to anyone besides the barista.  I favored places that still served bottomless cups of coffee; it was the closest I could come to the greasy spoon joints I’d find at two in the morning, sometimes still drunk.  Coffee cost a dollar, though at some point some old codger would be there bemoaning used to be a nickle. That was before ‘Fair Trade’ was meant to make us feel better about the blood cost of coffee.

I used to haunt coffee shops, though my second ex-wife would call me rude for being anti-social in a social space. Like I broke the contract I never signed.  Though I would step outside to smoke a sometimes bummed cigarette, which I believed counted for something.

There are fewer tables and chairs for ghosts now. Now all the aimless spirits wander digital landscapes with earbuds blocking out the hum of other people’s lives. The coffee is To Go whether I want to go or not. We wander unmoored for the lack of coffee shops and hardly anyone has a cigarette to give anymore.

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