Tag Archives: aging

2026, Day Book, Ohio River Valley Literature, poetry, prose

Daybook 2026 //Winter 1.9.26

I dropped my apple this morning and nearly choked on a cough drop. These, too, may become the symbols of an age; it certainly feels like symbols of my age, which is best classified as “Young but Feeling It.” Some apples are hardier than others. Like my mother’s mother, I favor tart pie apples. They remind me of the ones that used to grow on the trees in my mother’s parents’ yard, and long conversations over gin rummy about Jesus, back before I started being people’s great disappointment. 

It’s raining and from my desk in the basement, it could be a spring rain. It isn’t. The weather has been kind this week. but all that means is that somewhere on the other side of this rain is cooler weather. Tart pie apples still taste like spring when it is winter raining. Cough drops always taste like winter.

January 
rain
tastes
 like 
cough 
dro
ps tart 
pie apples
the expect
ation of fall
ing and becom
ing just 
a bruised apple
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2025, Ohio River Valley Literature, poetry

Two Poems On the First Day of Poetry Month

the creeping annoyances of middle-aging, in early spring

out of nowhere low-grade fevers and petty aches
the impossibility of sleep, maybe the worst indignity

or maybe all the extra consideration of all the small things:
to eat or not to eat fried food
tracking sugar intake
no to all things — caffeine, nicotine, full fat anything

treating the body
like an old rebuilt F-150, waiting
for the transmission to drop
running 80 down the interstate.

We are not a running people

for my daughter

We are not a running people
but there are those that are:
they fritter and flit,
live short, blinky firefly lives
remembered by the absence of light
compared kindly to stars, nor are we those
moved along assembly lines of soul and civilization
processed and packaged and distributed wholesale.

We are not them, to be prized then lost
in the back of a closet, broken
in the bottom of child’s toy box, disappeared
in the furniture with pennies and nickels
no one digs out anymore to buy
overpriced packs of cigarettes.

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2024, Ohio River Valley Literature, poetry

I’m turning into one of those old men, the kind

I’m turning into one of those old men, the kind
I used to watch and listen to carefully as a kid
standing on street corners smoking
back when old men did such things:

on a day off work, briar pipe in my mouth
paper coffee cup in hand, examining the world
to stay out of my own head.

One must learn to stand up against the weather –
which is largely preparation. The old men I remember
probably weren’t old, in the way I’m not really old

but I imagine how I look to my four-year-old granddaughter
this beard time-bleached white — the kind
youth-chasing men shave off to pretend
their virility at 20 is staring back at them
in the mirror as they gargle.

I feel much less wise than those old men
but I, too, have made my peace with regret.
This world is preparing itself to pass me by
so I buy new boots with heels to dig into the ground
spit,stare it straight in the eye.


My erasure will be of my own choosing though not
my own timing. The immortality
of old men smoking on street corners
comes in the passing on of the space
like a chair in a longstanding poker game.

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