I’m honored today to see another poem of mine featured by Spillwords Press. The title of the piece is “A Churchgoer Passes My Yard on Sunday Morning,” and you can find it right here.
Spillwords Press is “home for all that live and breathe words, spilled or inspired, through literature of every genre, from writers and poets of every walk of life.” Thanks once again to Editor Dagmara K. for allowing me to share my voice via this outstanding online literary magazine.
I called Trump a dirty word.
Here I stand in Facebook jail.
Now my voice remains unheard!
Curse that pompous orange whale!!!
“Jail: the Only Remedy,” Walter H. Gallaway, circa 1902
But it wasn’t this year’s upcoming Marvel Cinematic Universe movie — it was a real goddam highly venomous spider on the outside of my garbage pail just now. (The signature red hourglass marking would be on its underside.) I would have loved to find Scarlett Johansson clinging to the side of my garbage pails, but generally my luck doesn’t work like that.
My neighbor found it and pointed it out to me, and my Internet search indeed seems to confirm that it is of the Southern Black Widow Spider (Latrodectus mactans) species. I also learned two fun facts: 1) “black widows” are actually several species of spiders that are also called “true widows,” which I find vaguely poetic, and 2) these are the most venomous spiders in North America. The female’s bite is approximately 15 times more potent than than a rattlesnake bite. Okay … that second fact is probably more terrifying than it is “fun.”
My neighbor also started telling me other black widow facts, like how if you find one, you can expect to find more because of … mating season or something, but I literally walked away as fast as I could, because that’s the kind of fatally depressing news I expect from the national news.
Anyway, my best friend got a new pet just yesterday, and she keeps showing off her hamster pics — so maybe this is my way of keeping up with the Joneses.
Imagine the moon as companion,
and it will bring you ease on sleepless nights.
Smile at its quiet path,
its torpid, bright accord of lighted arc,
as though its delaying were willful –
-its timeless passage ponderous
to pass the time with you.
For if you find the moon familiar,
it will do what all true friends do:
it will ever smile back.
And, no matter what the world’s disorders,
what woes will weight your days and bind your nights to waking,
what griefs will clamor after you at night in heavy voices, as laden refrains in your heart,
what other departures, when lights you know in other hearts revolve and fall away in their own other, foreordained arcs,
the moon will always return to you.
The moon is more certain than even your own sorrows.
Think about it.
Light is infrequent in space — in existence.
Think about the unlikeliness of it …
the moon’s honorarium of precious metal,
moving and unvarying among measureless cold spaces to find you as it elegantly burns.
It’s almost inconceivable –eternity is mostly darkness, yet
your little corner of night’s nigh infinite black is made a rare and argent, kindled silver,
meant uniquely for you,
as bright, and nearly as beautiful, as you are.
(c) Eric Robert Nolan 2020
One of these is my long-haired pandemic giant nerd head.
One of these is Katsushika Hokusai’s “The Great Wave Off Kanagawa” (color woodblock, 19th Century Edo period). YOU CAN’T TELL THE DIFFERENCE CAN YOU?
WE ARE CURSED TO LIVE IN INTERESTING TIMES.
Hey, gang — thank you for all of the kind, funny and thoughtful well wishes for my birthday yesterday! You guys are the greatest!!
40 is a big year — and a big milestone — but you all made it a little easier for me to process. Love ya!!
[Update: Certain nefarious actors are perpetrating the HOAX that I am 48. This is FAKE NEWS. SAD!!]
What you see below is not Cousin It. That’s my goddam mullet.
Great news! The good folks over at Hiraeth Books will publish three of my poems in the coming months. “Not of Byzantium” and “All Our Faults Are Fallen Leaves” will appear in the Winter Issue of Illumen magazine, which will be released in January. “Industrial Revolution” will appear in the September Issue of The Fifth Di magazine.
If you follow this blog, then you know that Illumen is a favorite magazine of mine because of its excellent speculative poetry, but The Fifth Di is a magazine with which I’m not yet acquainted. It sounds like a terrific science fiction periodical, and I’ll be looking forward to reading my first copy when the September issue is published.
Thanks once again to Managing Editor Tyree Campbell for allowing me to share my voice with such outstanding indie lit publications!
Eric Robert Nolan, Author 