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Seal of Approval
She fans herself with a trowel she found in the basement of an old house that once belonged to Edgar Allan Poe – or so she says. I can’t really trust her, but she pays the bills, and I am just about finished with my novel. A surprise ending, a couple of edits here and there, and then I can go back to the wax museum, where they keep a candle burning in the window. I will be famous then. And once the cement dries, so will she.
The Question
He opened a can of worms. We were reclining in our folding chairs by the lake. That old jackknife with the bone handle made a jagged cut, but good enough to get our poles in the water. Do you believe in God? The sun was setting at the far end of the lake, slow ripples sparkling with purples and pinks. The air was still warm. It was quiet. Suddenly a tug on my line. A thump, the pull, the reel speeding into reverse, a struggle for freedom. In less than ten minutes I was holding up a sizable fish, a rainbow trout. Struggling to remove the hook, I couldn’t help seeing that one big eye, staring into my soul, like a bronze Buddha glistening in the rain. Dinner? I guess so, I said.
Mothers
A crow perches nonchalantly on a neighbor’s TV antenna, keeping an eye on the clothesline. Suddenly she swoops into the yard, snatches a baby blue washcloth in her black beak, and flies away. The nest is ready now: clothes hangers covered with straw and odds and ends of appropriated laundry. The blue eggs well-protected. Schoolchildren passing through the park duck away from the frenzied cause. They wend their way through the Walmart, filling the cart with diapers, pjs, cute little washcloths, a rattle, and, though he kind of objects, a pacifier. They pay and he looks closely at the credit card before tucking it into his wallet and taking her hand. It was the washcloth she used for the baby’s first bath, and she cries. It must have been that mean kid next door who took it, but she knows there is no point in asking. When her son gets home from school he has a nasty cut on his head. He says something about a crazy bird, but she suspects another fight with the brat next door. When will it stop? Like the alimony payments. And those damned crows with their god-awful cries.
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For the past 45 years Robert Witmer has lived in Tokyo, Japan, where he served as a Professor of English at Sophia University until his retirement in 2022. His poems have appeared in many print and online journals, including Lily Poetry Review, The Mean Street Rag, Bacopa Literary Review, New Verse News, Parody, Shot Glass Journal. A first book of poems, Finding a Way, was published in 2016. A second book, Serendipity, a collection of prose poetry pieces and haiku sequences, was published in March 2023. Besides these original works, he served as the lead editor for a series of translations of contemporary Japanese plays, Half a Century of Japanese Theater.
