2025, Ohio River Valley Literature, poetry, Working Class Literature

Post-Percolated Sonnet on Labor Day

Somewhere in the end-of-season sale landscape
history starves for lack of awareness
living on liquid sugar and fruit- flavored gummy snacks.
There is nothing to believe anymore
outside of memeworld proclamations.
We must be self-styled archeologists
finding earthenware hand-thrown truth
buried under a casino construction site
finding solace in our work, making the mind forget
as the dying kids of summer find an abandoned swimming pool
for reel swan dives while their parents, trying
not to give into wet dreams of their last cigarette
doomscroll through how-to videos of shit
their grandparents tried to teach them.

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2025, Ohio River Valley Literature, poetry, summer

It’s All Good

traffic noise ground and air on the sidewalk outside
the Schnitzelburg coffeeshop
the song of a conversation not in English – a light, stale breeze,  coffee black
and blackberry muffin warmed

the door dash driver, twice returned
with the IT’S ALL GOOD font license
plate
August cicadas yodeling death ballads from the trees

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2025, essay, Ohio River Valley Literature, prose

Wednesday is a Floating Day

This means that the rest of the time, we’re passing one another in our home on different schedules, grabbing for whatever time we can get. (from ” The Faded Sepia of River Mud)

On these days I feel like I’m operating in a different time zone.

No matter how much I try to let myself sleep in or try and make myself stay awake when I come in from standing 2nd shift watch, I wake up around 10 AM. Today is Flip Day in my schedule… I’m on night watch, midnight to 0800 tomorrow. I try and get a few things done around the house, write, drink tea instead of coffee. I know Earl Grey has caffeine in it, but there’s a little less caffeine in tea than in coffee and I find it easier to lay down and relax after tea. These days are me, the dogs, and an ungrateful, sweater humping cat. I’ve been watching this Netflix show, The Diplomat. Other than fish bowl murder mysteries, classic British sit coms, and oddly unending loops of The Mentalist, I like well written political intrigue.

What can I say? Television fiction is the only place I can find palatable politics at this point in the timeline.

It’s raining and snowing today. I’m putting off what is probably a novella knocking around in my head. I’m not often plagued by longer fiction nagging me to write it, but this one’s been going on for months, since taking the Mayor Andrew Broaddus to South Point. I’ve been writing that story in fits and snatches between rounds and reading Driftwood: A Biography of Harlan Hubbard. I want to get some sleep, but I also don’t like to waste one of my two full days off in the week.

I’d like to say I’m being amazingly domestic while Amanda is out doing the Good Work of the World. But I’m slouching in my very tired wing back chair, feet up on a foot stool, Chromebook perched on my right leg, writing. Season 2 of The Diplomat is on the television. This set up is sort of ideal for most of the writing I do; floating in the middle of things.

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