Artwork © Eric N. Peterson

Fuck That Guy–October 2020

Before heading to bed at 2:30 AM I empty today’s
coffee grounds into the metal compost can, bitter remnants
of another quarantined day and a maniac in the White House.
In the morning, still sluggish, a night brimming with hours
spent refreshing my news feed, binge watching
“Schitt’s Creek” or some other Netflix, a couple pages
in Weather by Jenny Offill, I’m grateful that all I need
to do is press a button and coffee flows like my blood pumping
hot after an hour on the elliptical, Molly Jong-Fast’s podcast
in my earbuds, announcing this week’s “Fuck That Guy.”

I try but can’t put a stop to my nearly dawn bedtimes.
I fill my days with news, poetry, an elliptical spin, amble
around the Hollow, mask donned or in my pocket,
although I’m rarely greeted by more than one large dalmatian,
who leaps, licks, refuses to be ignored. The cows too, demand
attention. Bunched together they stare at me mute, like faces
on a Zoom screen, till their emphatic moos distort and shatter
the calm. Dinner, dishes, a wipe of the counter with alcohol
dampened paper towels, then the spiral of my late night
begins and I’m dumping the coffee grounds at 2:30 AM.

Laurie Rosen splits her time between the Massachusetts coastline and a home tucked deep into a hollow in Vermont. Her poems have appeared in Sisyphus, Tigershark Magazine, The London Reader, Rosette Maleficarum, The Muddy River Poetry Review, Beach Reads, an anthology from Third Street Writers and Peregrine.

Eric N. Peterson is from Atlanta, Ga. He’s been drawing cartoons all his life. He leans towards the absurd, imaginative, and the surreal, as that’s where all the flavor is.