The cedar stump that held
my father’s, the professor’s, cocktails,
he would be glad to know,
has become a nurse log,
its saw-shorn rings of cleavage
bog-like to the roots of seedlings,
to a winding-sheet of thriving lichens,
to a trembling colonnade of sporophytes
on the soft green lips of mosses,
and to the spring grouse
who, like I, with an eternal
vacuum and a momentary boom,
now drum upon it.

John Fritzell lives and writes in Appleton. His recent work has appeared in Plainsongs, One Sentence Poems, Tiny Seed Literary Journal, and the WFOP calendar. His debut chapbook Thuribles was out in May 2021 from Kelsay Books.