Tag Archives: Virginia

North Jefferson Street in Roanoke, Virginia, looking south, 1951

The original source for this photo is the National Archives; I found it via the cool people at Virginia Life Stories.

“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

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



 

Mary Washington College friends are the best.

My alumbud Rick Slagle: “My Mary Washington friend has been published again and I am enjoying my 2nd Eric Nolan book!”

Thanks, man!



Poetry and commentary, 2025

The past year was the best ever for poetry and commentary, with publications in the United States, Britain, Ireland, Germany, India and Bangladesh — along with a short story publication in Chile.

You can find all the links to my 2025 poetry and commentary at the link below. Thanks for coming along for the ride.  🙂

Poetry and Commentary, 2025



“Athletics,” Bulletin of the Normal School for Women, Fredericksburg, Virginia, April, 1920

What would later become Mary Washington College.