Haphazardly, she stepped on the bathroom scale. It read:
to be continued. Not good, but no less ridiculous than
he, alone in the dark, putting out the black eyes
of his pencils, releasing those undernourished images.
The closed and open universe of the refrigerator
is where she finds herself, haphazardly, of course,
gazing at a slab of plated chicken, two triangles
of pizza, dead father floating with the bottled olives.
Scratch, scratch, goes his tenacious, little implement
while clouds choke the moon and not haphazardly.
Too late for the apostles to start their all-hands-on-deck
apostle shtick. Of course, you’ve heard that already.
Everything else: to be continued. Go on, eat. The poem
is the night light in the room where no one sleeps.

–Thom Ward,
Etcetera’s Mistress (2011)
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.