Poetry / Gregory Trotter

:: Spolier Alert ::

All of the characters
die in this story &
not in the order you’d prefer 
nor the manner you’d expect 
 
some had a good run
did noble stuff & ate their veggies
others lived just as long
fueled by a white hot hate
 
a Dick for every Jane
you could say & no promise
of a heaven or hell to sort it all out
no proof of another go round 
 
what meaning to make
my darlings but love
 
what solace to take
my darlings but life itself 
humming with menace

beneath us a current
forever a doom
scroll gleaming 
in the darkness.
 
There’s no such thing as bad weather
your mother likes to say
as she bundles up resolute
and walks out the door
 
she’ll return in an hour or two
with the wild scent of snow &
pine light in her eyes and
she’ll say
it’s not that cold out
it’s not that bad 
it feels good in the sun.

From the writer

:: Account ::

I’ve writ­ten poet­ry since dis­cov­er­ing the dark and delight­ful verse of Edgar Allan Poe when I was
in sixth grade. Oh, you should have seen my efforts then to mim­ic his verse. Shame­less and
adorable in ret­ro­spect. Got­ta start some­where, am I right?

The sum­mer before, I had my first French kiss with a girl on a pier in Indi­anola, Wash­ing­ton.
The kiss was awful–just two gup­pies gasp­ing for air–but the moon and the phos­pho­res­cence in
the water were mag­ic beyond my fath­om­ing. In broad strokes, Poe paint­ed a way for­ward.
For decades, my poet­ry was large­ly con­fined to my lit­tle black mole­skin jour­nals, my own pri­vate
scrib­blings as my life’s course wend­ed through careers, moves, births, deaths, and all sorts of
oth­er big and lit­tle hap­pen­ings. Only in recent years have I sought to share my poems with
oth­ers through pub­li­ca­tion in lit­er­ary jour­nals and the like. What a bless­ing to redis­cov­er one’s
art through the eyes and ears of oth­er peo­ple, espe­cial­ly in mid­dle age.

One’s art sounds hoity-toity. But if I have any art at all, this is it. These hun­gry lines. This tiny
hum­ble flame. It ain’t much but I aim to keep it burn­ing. Recur­ring themes in my work seem to
include water, more water, bears and crit­ters of all kinds, love, liquor and ghosts. I am bit by bit
piec­ing togeth­er some crude under­stand­ing of my life and the world around me.

Gre­go­ry Trot­ter is a Chica­go area poet; his work has been recent­ly pub­lished in Swing, the Prog­en­i­tor Art & Lit­er­ary Jour­nal and East on Cen­tral. He stud­ied cre­ative writ­ing at UC-San­ta Cruz and jour­nal­ism at North­west­ern Uni­ver­si­ty, and enjoyed many wild adven­tures in between. He lives in High­land Park, Illi­nois with his wife and two daughters.