Tag Archives: Eric Robert Nolan

My college pal Amy took this picture the other day …

But it’s actually a trick license plate.  (It only says “Hysteria” when you’re near.)

“Her Smile Was Silver Jupiter”

It was a mad and spinning world in which you met her, but she was a mad and spinning girl — so brightly and resolutely burning that she herself was celestial. There was starshine bottled up in her heart, solar winds charged the particles of her thoughts, ions in the atmosphere ignited her impulses. Her willful joy was her own burning sun.

When she was sly, her eyes were hasty comets. Her passion amassed from Saturnal storms. Her smile was silver Jupiter– you wanted to repose over its white sands, beside the stained and rose-metal lakes of smoldering, darkening copper.

Between the spaces of her words, chasms of cosmos would occasionally open. You could stare into those depths for indifferent and measureless distances of light years — the sublime nightmare-nothingness that Providence had made, the Forever-of-Empty-Dark. But before you could be afraid, her own gravity drew you in.

And you were glad. That such loveliness could exist in a single soul was reassurance. (The Forever-of-Empty-Dark wasn’t entirely empty, after all.) And you were grateful — grateful for her rejoinders, for the taste of her mouth on your own, for her girlish laugh, for the way that she regularly lighted a murky Earth with the moonbeams of her quiet kindnesses.

She was unstoppable. Ultraviolet rode the coronal shades of her irises, and flared in her contemplation. She blazed. Magnetic radiation murmured in her poetry. You loved her for her uniqueness in a universe of cold space, for the way that she burned and turned and burned and turned without ever slowing or expiring. When her light fell across you, you could almost believe that you, too, were spinning and illuminated. You loved her enough for the illusion alone.

You loved her more for her gravity that drew you in and held you, and for her arms that did the same.

— “Her Smile Was Silver Jupiter,” by Eric Robert Nolan



Throwback Thursday: a Pre-gray Nolan.

This was … ten years ago, I believe.

A misty Roanoke morning, November 2025

Don’t mess with Memphis?

It’s moments like this that the lady will say, “This is the Memphis in me,” or “The Memphis came out.”



Tell me these do not look like coffins.

I thought Dracula had arrived in Roanoke — which would be weird, because there’s no place for The Demeter to dock.

Either that or my lifelong descent into madness had finally yielded its first visual hallucinations.

Turns out these thick metal implements were left there by an excavating company.  They’re just smallish plow blades for pushing aside snow, seen from the rear.  (They are open on the other side.)



Abandon all hope, ye who enter here …

Hey, guys.  If my strange and archaically worded ravings amuse you, I’ve started a page here at the site for 2026 poetry.  You can find it right here:

Poetry, 2026



 

“Accident Allison,” by Eric Robert Nolan

Accident Allison, what the heck?!
Again you nearly broke your neck?!
Looking for your wayward cat,
did you trip and then fall flat?

Accident Allison, what the hell?!
Your puppy pulled and then you fell?
Did you bonk your pretty noodle
chasing after Ulley Poodle?

Accident Allison, Jeezum Crow!
Did you stub your middle toe?
Did it meet the metal rake
while you raced a garden snake?

Accident Allison, what’s the news?
Is your bottom slightly bruised?
Did you fall backwards on your tush
while charming frogs beneath a bush?

Accident Allison, Holy Smoke!!
Your back-left foot is nearly broke?!
Was your latest peccadillo
dancing with an armadillo?

You’ll never be a train conductor,
ballet coach or ski instructor.
Such dreams are best subordinated —
you’re too uncoordinated.

Your fortunes are deplorable
but charms are unignorable:
ingenious, wise and beautiful,
good-natured and adorable!



Illustration by artist Hugo von Hofsten from Dogs and Puppies, Barse & Hopkins, 1908.

Today’s portmanteau:

Snow + ordeal = Snowrdeal.



 

“A One-Sentence Note Following a Departure”

All rooms in which you are absent

are endlessly and sadly silent.



Photo credit:Berenice Zambrano from DF, Mexico, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0&gt;, via Wikimedia Commons