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Tears Are Time Travel
I didn’t feel well.
Granny let me stay
home from school.
45 years passed.
Father died.
Like a champ.
Didn’t even dip into
the painkillers the
hospice left in plenty.
The night before he went
I asked him how he was doing.
He said “Okay, I just have to beat this.”
The day he died
bulldozers started tearing
at the woods behind our house.
A long feared and protested event
happening now like a staged
scene in a John Sayles movie.
Mother died.
Not so good.
Howls of the soul so
twisted and agonized that
a lifetime of horror movies,
Catholic school
and Flannery O’Connor
could not prepare me for.
I hunted mushrooms
in my backyard woods
wearing soggy Batman slippers
with my granny.
I’m still there.
I’m pretty much here.
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Rupert Wondolowski is the author of Dreams Are My Social Life (Publishing Genius), Mattress In an Alley, Raft Upon the Sea (Fell Swoop), The Origin of Paranoia as a Heated Mole Suit (Publishing Genius), and The Whispering of Ice Cubes (Shattered Wig Press). From 1988 to 2007 he edited the Shattered Wig Review literary arts zine and Shattered Wig Press, publishing 27 issues of the Review and close to 20 chapbooks by national authors, including many by cult author and artist Blaster Al Ackerman, on the Press. During that time he also hosted monthly Shattered Wig Nights at the legendary Baltimore club, 14 Karat Cabaret, run by artist Laure Drogoul.
Since 2013 he has performed in spectral folk adjacent The Mole Suit Choir with Liz Downing and, since 2020, Greg Hatem. They have recorded and released three albums, Campfire Spacesuit, Phantom Paddle Boat, and Doomsday Lamp. They set the poetry of Rupert and other Baltimore poets to music with guitar, bowed banjo, and electronics.
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Flannery O’Connor. Self-Portrait, 1953
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Author: Terence Winch
