by Dick Hanus
Poof!
I did magic for a living. I made time pass quickly – hours into minutes where no one breathed louder than was necessary. Our floors were messy like art studios. The walls were the Louvre. Somewhere in the color palettes were mixed signals. Equations floated in space as mere guidelines. Everyone received daily invitations to invent their own. We tested everything. Nothing was exempted. Cooking eggs on the sidewalk in mid-August sun. Making ice cream in old metal Folger’s coffee cans which we kicked across the campus. Licking the backhand of science that felt like stegosaurus spikes on our young tongues. There were too many flavors to package in a box. We labeled what we needed and ignored the rest. At the end of each day there was smoke in the classroom, hovering halfway from the ceiling like the show they paid to see.
When John Dorroh plans to write poetry about a specific subject, it seems he often hits a wall. On the other hand, he receives “gifts” from out of the blue. If he’s, let’s say driving when this happens, he safely pulls over and makes some notes. His poetry has appeared in 128 journals, including North of Oxford, Kissing Dynamite, El Portal, and River Heron Review. He’s from Mississippi, lives in the St. Louis area, and makes his second home in Asheville, NC.
Dick Hanus had four kids but now just three. Zen and Love.