Tag Archives: Prose Poem

2024, essay

Things That Remain in Spite of Us

Dynamic Earth – Ocean Currents by NASA Goddard Photo and Video is licensed under CC-BY 2.0

Recent flooding brings to mind the 1997 flood… the first one I really remember. There have been others since. There will be more. That year, the Ohio River flooded. The town of Falmouth, Kentucky, was washed away: entire buildings moved off their foundations. The river was 52 feet above flood stage in Cincinnati. It reached 15.76 feet above flood stage in Louisville.

There was a year, I don’t remember which, that Triplett Creek flooded and the southwest end of town flooded. That same year, a drought caused a fire in the mountains above Morehead, Kentucky and they burned for what seemed like the entire summer. The mountains bore the scar for years.

I still dream of these things. It was a pivotal time for me. As I get older, I find myself more interesting in Things That Remain in Spite of Us: the mountains, the river. They bear the mark of our presence; but they remain. What gets washed away will be rebuilt… it won’t be the same, because it will carry the mark of the flood in spite of any attempt to erase it.

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2022, homeless, Louisville Stories, Ohio River Valley Literature, poetry, psychogeography, river life, the no-scape

shadow city / glistening city

I saw the great blue heron twice. The city beneath and beside the city peopled with broken dreamers. Stamped FAULTY and flushed away with dead fish and miscarried fetuses, they bring forth their dreams and sweet wine to keep warm against early winter kisses carried in on the wind with whitecaps and choppy waves.

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2022, Ohio River Valley Literature, poetry, Prose Poem, psychogeography, the no-scape, work

This

A bit of a nice break from the heat, this. A few days break. Not quite Fall’s first kiss, but a bit of a tease. These moments. The sunset over Portland, bits of brilliant light crackling out from behind watercolor clouds. I collect these moments the way I used to collect baseball cards and matchbox cars as a child. True, there are other collections. Rocks. Books. But these moments have more staying power. Not because memory is an infallible thing. Not because I take pictures to try and capture each moment. But because these moments exist in memory, like bugs preserved in amber, whether I retain the context or not. Even the best of memories fade. What does not fade is this moment, this setting sun, the hawk that flew over earlier, a train whistle calling from the 14th Street bridge, that crackling light fading the way a bonfire fades, only to become the ember of a fire as of yet unborn. This.

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