"Digging" by Douglas Cole

I am digging my way through plateau clay pounding with an iron bar and pic axe lifting shovelfuls of rattling rock and pebble earth alone out here except for Tony the neighbor who works nights and will rise at two and come over in his bathrobe and smoking a cigarette to see if I’ve made any progess or maybe old Joan will bring her shopping cart looking for scraps of wood to burn and I’ll warn her back and say not today Joan because she must have stepped on a board with a nail in it since I saw one bloody footprint going back to her house down the blockI’ll dig through the afternoonI have nowhere to go and nothing else to do Paul Harvey telling the rest of the story the old ones still lingering in the debris and I’ll dig down as earth changes colors and sky becomes a bright dime overhead digging through years of evidence train stations and apartment rooms head colds and children and divorce degrees and jobs and overwhelming debt regime change and reruns and lightning storms my hands growing old and bones breaking down the blood dry and flaking and blowing away with old Joan and Tony there at the gate as I pay my way in with my dime of sky.

Douglas Cole has published four collections of poetry. His work is in anthologies and also appears or is  forthcoming in journals such as The Chicago Quarterly Review, Owen Wister Review, Chiron, The Galway Review, and Slipstream. He has been nominated for a Pushcart and Best of the Net, and has received the Leslie Hunt Memorial Prize in Poetry; the Best of Poetry Award from Clapboard House; First Prize in the “Picture Worth 500 Words” from Tattoo Highway. His website is douglastcole.com.

Abstract collage artist Dani Preston is a California native currently living in Lyon, France. Using scissors and paper to create psychedelic abstract compositions, her collages spill out tangled amoeba-like guts, spotted orbs and human hands. Titling her works Cosmic Jelly, she is expressing human connectedness as wiggles of life dance across the universe of the paper. You can find more of her art on Instagram at @cosmicjellycollage.