For the Girl at the Athens Comic Fair With the Crematorium Advertising Tote

About twice a year, life pokes me right between the eyes, eliminating the 29 greying hairs that form my unibrow. Like today — my first book fair — where I’m hawking my three strikingly different tomes (my latent ADHD no doubt) but the odd truth is that here at the Athens Comic Fair I’ve sold more gourmet venison cookbooks than graphic novels, and I’m perplexed by the apparently invisible connection between venison cookery and the ink and cosplay of most attendees. Okay, that’s snarky and side-eyed, I apologize. So, my just published volume of poetry abuts graphic novel and cook book — old, straight, married, white guy stuff, spiced and colored with the usual dogwood and azalea free verse — a life in toto wrapped up in 112 pages, and it’s now hour four — my energy flat as the new blacktop on Milledge Heights, but I’ve made table and parking fees, so who can complain, et voila, she walks by and I notice her tote inscribed with la phrase juste for everything everywhere, right? Witness the evanescent, and transitory nature of all matter, corporeal or not: life, literature, art, and music, all take that last, lung-filling breath, and then — the final swoosh of nothingness.

Sooner, rather than later — we’re all part of the burn pile.

MacQueen’s Quinterly #20, 2023