Late
by Mark Blaeuer
One week after elections,
when the populace spoke (or at least grunted),
cold rain.
My wife learned
the term for what she had—festination—
sounded joyous, hardly a symptom of Parkinson’s.
That night, I walked out to our mailbox,
neighbor dogs in voice
again.
Stars and planets began to pierce the clouds,
opening
threadbare fabric.
Mark Blaeuer lives just south of Lofton, Arkansas. He was a ranger for twenty years at nearby Hot Springs National Park. His poems have appeared in Bluepepper, The Charleston Anvil, The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, Deep South Magazine, El Portal, Nimrod International Journal of Prose and Poetry, Otoliths, RE:AL Literary Magazine, SLANT: A Journal of Poetry, The Ultramarine Review, and dozens of other publications. His collections are Fragments of a Nocturne (Kelsay Books, 2014) and Surfacing Below (SurVision Books, 2025). Find him at Bluesky.
