James Reitter

Pride and Woodpeckers

I can’t imagine you in Austen’s world
of status, circumstance—much too stiff,
the air too tight. You need the smoke to curl
around your fingers and conversations: a gift
of intimacies between an inhale/exhale exchange.
Those breaths give rhythm to our song and dance,
the patterns woven together, rearranged
throughout some twenty years of happenstance.
The smoke survives in ambiguous layers, tied
together by mystery, science. We are the same,
still curling in and out along with the tide
as the suns and moons come and go. The rain
invites a fog along to join the smoke—
appropriate for a Tom Robbins book.

(previously published in Bone and Ink Press, 2018).


Happy Hour at The Well-Rotted Corpse Bar & Grill

A Cimmerian and a Miskatonic
amble into a bar at the edge
of impossibility, a local hotspot
for end-of-the-worlders.
The two have been allies for ages.
Cimmerian orders ale
Miskatonic calls for fireball
The barkeep just shakes his head
& sets down three glasses
of the house poison: Rooted Serpent.

"To the battle" boasts Cimmerian
"To the Old Ones" toasts Miskatonic
Barkeep gloats: "To all us monsters"


Thrift Store Junk(ie)

Walking the aisles of thrift stores
a chance to relive childhood through
die-cast toys, outdated pixilated video games,
8-track players and assorted vinyl albums,
I have become the old man who hums to
himself, hands behind back, strolling along
through Goodwill or filing in rank
at the Salvation Army.

I now smirk at the mischief of teens who
assemble the stocking hangers in the Christmas aisle
to read SATAN and find myself swapping order
to keep in the spirit of things. I look
at all the golf clubs, but consistently forget the exact club
I’m searching for. Forty-five degrees? Thirty degrees? It’s what
my father calls a lob wedge. Books are always on the radar.

Our house is furnished from these places. Spent twelve fifty on
the couch, twenty-five on a set of Danish chairs. Three hundred
sixty on a teak buffet. Wooden birds, old cameras,
wind-up toys, collections of elephants and owls—reminders
of my grandparents—consume all available space on bookcases
and shelves. There is definable pleasure in the hunt.

On February 28^th, I proposed at St. Vinny’s in Plymouth,
on my knee inspecting a beer stein. That’s on my shelf too.


About the Author

James Reitter is an Associate Professor and teaches English Literature, Folklore, Creative Writing, and Film Studies. He has been writing and publishing poetry for over three decades and his first ekphrastic collection, Scratched Records, was published in 2019. He also co-authored Speculative Modernism. How Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Conceived the 20^th Century in 2021 and is editor-in-chief of the online literature and arts journal, Masque and Spectacle (masqueandspectacle.com). He lives with his wife and cat in southern Dutchess County, New York.

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