Winter won’t give itself over to spring. She said,
If you start out depressed, everything else is a bonus.
Each morning I piss excellence, was his response.
If we’re lucky, notes trudge out to us, and sometimes
we start singing upside down. Invisible trolls
smash old radiator pipes with their invisible hammers.
Hello to the firelight in scotch, goodbye to the smoke
in whiskey. Is that a sudden rush of comfort? Or just
another guy playing catch-and-release consumer?
The couch in my shrink’s office continues to bet against
me, and the bank plans to mortgage my shadow.
Travel Sunday morning in Saturday’s shoes: recall
how the weight of that leather will outlast us, except
for those embarrassments our children agreed to forgive.

–Thom Ward,
Etcetera’s Mistress
Accents Publishing

Thom Ward is sole proprietor of Thom Ward’s Poetry Editing and Proofreading Services. Ward’s poetry collections include Small Boat with Oars of Different Size (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2000) and Various Orbits (Carnegie Mellon, 2004). Ward’s poetry chapbook, Tumblekid, winner of the 1998 Devil’s Millhopper poetry contest, was published by the University of South Carolina-Aiken in 2000. His collection of prose poems, The Matter of the Casket, was published by CustomWords in 2007. Ward teaches creative writing workshops at high schools and colleges around the country, tutors individual poetry students, and edits poetry manuscripts. He is a faculty and advisory board member at Wilkes University’s Graduate Creative Writing program in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. Thom Ward lives in western New York with his girlfriend Jennifer and their cat Phantom.