[180 words]
It starts spending nights in towns with names you despise like Sheboygan or Kaukauna and maybe it’s the towns themselves who spend these nights together entwining their infrastructure and wet alleyways while you sit home manage what remains of your life children pets another book to pull from the pyramid the faceless body pillow yearning for your body wrinkled and twisted another night in no one’s arms hostage to dead narratives missing women serial killers an assassin with one more job And your life will come back for now tell you it had fun in the other town in friend town tell you that the whole of you remains whole Nothing to be done when you barely have the will to stand on the worn carpet let alone conjure love on a schedule Your life crumbles under old advice columns your life is online scrolling through profiles of other lives and ugly towns Manitowoc Little Chute while you feign sleep sneak a glance through a barely open eye and even you can see that it was all worth traveling for
Chuck Rybak lives in Wisconsin and is a Professor of English, Writing, and Humanities at the University of Wisconsin—Green Bay, where he coordinates their prison education initiative. He is the author of two chapbooks and two full-length collections of poetry. Chuck also writes on Substack as The Declining Academic.
