Wave
Hand goes up, hand goes down.
That’s a wave,
hello and goodbye.
That’s a truck passing by,
headed
somewhere,
somewhere beyond here.
One hundred years, a day.
That’s the truck,
the wave.
What we’ve got is hello and goodbye,
always both
at the same time.
Stiff Drink
These grass-brown end-of-summer evenings,
quiet, sad
like a dying friend,
dog bleeding on the porch
steps, blanketed,
the season’s last light
racing barbed wire, fences running east some unknown
distance, call it
one hundred miles,
to reach beyond the curve, a place already
dark. Hell,
call it five hundred miles, make it ten thousand, make it
whiskey, neat.
Don’t clean the glass,
or if you do, please, use your dirty
sleeve. Better yet,
use the blanket.
Bionote
Leath Tonino is a freelancer writer, born and raised in Vermont. His poetry, fiction, and essays appear in magazines such as Orion, The Sun, New England Review, Tricycle, Utne Reader, and Outside. Prior to turning his attention to writing, he worked as an ornithologist on the Grand Canyon's North Rim.
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