Richard Weaver
Miss Eyrie smiles
for your company and courtly manners which she loves and loathes like fresh bread,
and proffers perfectly square cubes of sugar on a polished silver-plated spoon. Your
open mouth says yes without your lips moving No. You are entranced. Bewitched. And
bothersome.But still good company. If strange. Strange that you should be here on this
hemisphere of mortal pain. Even stranger that your solitude drew you here when you
thought you were invisible, hiding between the book's pages, one you were only
pretending to read while talking with your other selves. Her silence is intolerable
without a double espresso asking, Will you kindly massage the squash-rotted but
otherwise-normal gray matter between your ears and stand aside?
Bio
Post-Covid, the author has returned as the writer-in-residence at the James Joyce Pub. Among his other pubs: conjunctions, Louisville Review, Southern Quarterly, Free State Review, Hollins Critic, Misfit Magazine, Loch Raven Review, The Avenue, New Orleans Review, & SOI. He's the author of The Stars Undone (Duende Press, 1992), and wrote the libretto for a symphony, Of Sea and Stars (2005). He was a finalist in the 2019 Dogwood Literary Prize in Poetry. His 195th Prose poem was recently published since 2016.