The Pale Autumn Moon

Written By Joe Smolen

How can I love her?

 

Let me count the ways.

 

The heat of her glare affects me as if I were an ejected baby bat left exposed on a hot sidewalk.

 

She is much shorter than a refrigerator,

 

But more massive.

 

Her laugh is the final word of a steel door

 

Being slammed rapidly.

 

Her face is 

 

Like the pale Autumn moon,

 

Occluded by a storm cloud,

 

Wearing perpetually, hyper-vigilantly

 

The same expression,

 

A studied I-dare-you belligerence.

 

She is identifiably human.

 

How can I love her?

 

Help me find a way.

Joe Smolen

Joe C. Smolen, AKA L.W. Smolen is an Oregon Coast writer of insufficiently exaggerated notoriety. Never having been arrested, he lives with his wife Sherrie and the ghost of their black, Standard Poodle Rico Suave in a really pretty good, Prairie Style house they built themselves. Since the Literary Magazine Fleas on the Dog of Kitchener, Ontario has permanently stopped accepting submissions, in order to read L.W. Smolen’s 2021 short fiction, A Real Guy, you are referred to joecsmolen.com. Some of L.W’s other, subsequent short fictions are archived at Olive Tree Review, Ginosko, Cardinal Sins Journal, Wrath Bearing Tree, Wilderness House and etc. Kirkus reviews once interpreted his work favorably.

https://joecsmolen.com
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