Union Station
Almost every person ever to appear on Earth
is off into the great beyond, the void, heaven,
the next life. I’m out of here myself, depending
on what year you’re reading this. You’re gone too,
likely sooner than idealized. The drum
beats time away, always going, no exemptions.
Evolved thinkers trick themselves
to be cool with the temporary state.
Welcome to the transfer depot,
fellow footnotes of history, fellow blips
on the wider consciousness.
Hope to see you
before your ride leaves.
Counsel from the Cloud
When you were alive,
we had fewer arguments.
Once your ticker stopped,
your voice took up residence
on-going critique, advice.
We’re not really gone
while someone hears our echoes.
We’re still chiming in,
our breathing proxies shouldered
with such devils and angels.
Todd Mercer won the first Woodstock
Writers Festival’s Flash Fiction contest. His chapbook, Box of Echoes, won the
Michigan Writers Cooperative Press contest and his digital chapbook, Life-wish Maintenance, is forthcoming from RHP Books.
Mercer's poetry and fiction appear in Apocrypha & Abstractions, Blue Collar Review, The Camel Saloon,
Camroc Press Review, Cease, Cows,
Cheap Pop, Dunes Review, East
Coast Literary Review, Eunoia Review, Falling Star, 50-Word Stories, The Fib
Review, The Lake, The Legendary, Main Street Rag Anthologies, Mobius: The
Journal of Social Change, One Sentence Poems, Postcard Poems and Prose,
Postcard Shorts, Right Hand Pointing, The Second Hump, and Spartan. Mercer bounces between Grand Rapids and Antrim
County, Michigan.
