Tag Archives: American prose

2025, Autumn, Ohio River Valley Literature, poetry, prose, Prose Poem, psychogeography, travel

Was a time, I’d bring Fall home in my rucksack

During my traveling days, I preferred to go during transitional seasons. Fall was my favorite time, and I’d go north, against the migration of birds. I’d go to the mountains, or to big sky country, where the season unfurls earlier, go in search of the dying expressions of the leaves: red, orange, yellow, the resistant evergreens. There are lessons to be learned from the last gasp of beauty before the trees stand naked, bare armed against the coming winter.  It is possible to relearn the smell of the air before the weather changes, before rain; the cold prelude kiss of an early snowfall… things forgotten in an age of digitized hyper-realities and Hallmark memories of a man-made world that never really existed. And when I arrived back to home’s warm arms, I unpacked and set it free: the bright dying, the scent of the air.

It was the only homecoming gift I could think of that mattered.

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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.

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2024, Ohio River Valley Literature, poetry, river life

My work boots mooring me against the current of the Earth

I, moonsick by the river watching the waning gibbous loom large rise out of the horizon and over the 2nd Street Bridge above mam-made mountains of steel and brick and glass swimming in the chilly December air

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