My Friend Ted

Corey Mesler

            “Where do we go when we die? he said.

            I don’t know, the man said.  Where are we now?”

                                    Cormac McCarthy

My friend, Ted, lost his battle,

as they say,

with cancer. He was my age.

His last days

were a horrid mess, the kind of

nightmare

one’s mind wishes to skate over.

I balk at the phrase

lost his battle,

afraid perhaps that I would not

be a good soldier,

even in this, the final casus belli. .

Send money, say prayers, write

poems: it’s

not even a brave face, really. It’s

just the angry

shaking of the tree, the desire to

see the fruits fall

gently, evenly distributed upon us all,

while they are ripest.

Corey Mesler has published prose and/or poetry in Turnrow, Adirondack Review, American Poetry Journal,  Paumanok Review, Yankee Pot Roast, Monday Night, Elimae, H_NGM_N, The Journal of Experimental Fiction, Poet Lore, Forklift OH, Euphony, Rattle, Jabberwock Review, Dicey Brown, Cordite, Cellar Door, others.

His novel-in-dialogue, Talk, was published by Livingston Press in 2002. Lucky blurbs from Lee Smith, Robert Olen Butler, Steve Stern, Debra Spark, Suzanne Kingsbury, Frederick Barthelme and John Grisham.  His new novel, We are Billion-Year-Old Carbon, is also from Livingston Press. Kind words this time from George Singleton, Marshall Chapman, Marshall Boswell and others. He also has published 5 chapbooks in 2006, with 2 more due in 2007. My poem, Sweet Annie Divine, was chosen for Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac. He has been nominated for the Pushcart numerous times.

He has been a book reviewer, fiction editor, University press sales rep, grant committee judge, father and son. With his wife he owns Burke’s Book Store, one of the country’s oldest (1875) and best independent bookstores. He can be found at www.coreymesler.com.