Two poems by Todd Mercer

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.