I haven’t posted in a while — not since May, actually — but it hasn’t been for lack of time, content or want-to. I just decided my next post was going to share a short story that’s scheduled to be published … sometime. It was originally supposed to be published on June 20, but the issue was delayed. And delayed. And (I’ll give you one guess) delayed. It’s understandable. Most literary magazines these days are run on zero budget by people who receive no reward other than the good feeling in their bellies for helping bring new fiction to the world. So here I am three post-less months later when the subject of this post literally blew into my front yard. The wife and I were out doing yard work today when she found the two shreds of paper pictured above and discovered it was someone’s abandoned poem.

I have always been an awful poet. The only poetry I’ve ever written exists in a folder on my computer, and this folder is titled: Very Bad Poetry. The folder does not lie. If a digital file storage space could be burned, I would douse Very Bad Poetry in lighter fluid and watch those miserable words float back into the atmosphere. As it is, I just need to try that double delete thing. So, all that is to say, I understand this mystery poet’s frustration with her or his words. I don’t know the full content of this poem, whether it was bad or good or meaningful or trite. I only know what was left on two quarters of paper. But poems are pretty incomplete creatures by nature. To sound like more of a lit wonk than I am, their meaning is in the space between the words. Well, if that’s the case, then I thought maybe these shards of a poem are the poem.

And with that, I’d like to present:

A Poem

by Anonymous

Of this divine

Each born are the

Forever to love

Each born bare the

forever look often

To the heavens

endless thoughts of

describe

To the heavens I

endless thoughts of

divine Nature

I can only compare