Previous Issue: Spring/Summer 2010

Sad Little Hour  
Doug Ramspeck

Nimbus of dusk: breathing naked
in the gray mirror, sitting in its chair.

To walk evenings to the bridge
overlooking the slow-moving water.

Little copy of itself: lengthening forever.

Years layering one atop the other.

While outside the window the rheumy eye
of moon, gout infected.
The yellow pus of clouds drifting by.

Three crows in a black willow, four in a tupelo.

Like the time we drowned
then sat down with our families for supper.

To write in our journals: here is the skin
that I have shed.

Clothes/hair dripping, lungs asleep.

To live in the penumbral avenues
of consciousness.

And no one with the heart
to tell us.

Doug Ramspeck is the author of Black Tupelo Country, which was selected for the 2007 John Ciardi Prize for Poetry and is published by BkMk Press. The recipient of a 2009 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award for 2009, his work appears in Prairie Schooner, West Branch, Third Coast, Northwest Review, and elsewhere. He directs the Writing Center and teaches creative writing at The Ohio State University at Lima.