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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/versation, poetry, Recommended

on [You Are Not Lost] by Jeri Frederickson

[this is less a critique than a response / more like something that resembles a conversation (aye maybe)]

that erased penny memory (5) perhaps / all this loose change not so loose but counted carefully / counted like deeply cared for throw-aways / things only cared about when it seems no one looks when it seems / the world burns in the absence of such things / aye yes / not a wasted word not a word tossed off in the name of some silly thing like sentiment / the world it expects / sentiment and will sift through the detritus through the sediment / in search of some reflective nostalgia over / looking sadness perhaps / if you prick us do we bleed / yas sass yas but seriously what is blood it dries the color of spit on clay-filled dirt / words cast off what on the wind will find ears / find blood / find / find / that penny heads up ready to be plucked up added / to a loose change jar:: powder reconstituted into animated bones

Buy it here.

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