Joel Fry

A Widower




Your comfort educated me
for ten years. I understood all
you supposed from the first
month we dated until I understood
your death. You kept me loving
the life we endured.

I am old now at thirty, always
after the funeral and the flowers,
older than most of what I see, older
than the wealth bound in my bones,
older than I imagine when I sleep
in the whispering of my wishes.

My desire to see you approaches
a spacious center, a warm room filled,
a secret overheard.

Still, in all I know of the green
world expanding, fading into the
forest that becomes memory after
the day's movement ends and a pause
surrounds the winter retreats of my den
and bedroom, I understand.

I will always peer into the flickers
of this vanishing life, into the fleeting feet
still naked, the strangers that survive acquaintance,
the livelihood abandoned in the pursuit of living.






Joel Fry: I live in Athens, Alabama, and I work as a mental health worker in Decatur, Alabama. In my work I try to improve the lives of the mentally ill and mentally retarded. I have had work published in the Melic Review, Stirring and Eclectica.





Dorothy Mienko Barry Seiler Lisa Gordon Stephen Mead Michael P. Workman T. Lewis Olga Lalić-Krowicka Joel Fry Dave Ruslander Anna Kaye Forsyth Keith Nunes