April 2020

bio

art by sonjaye maurya

    Rich Follett is a High School English and Creative Writing teacher who has been writing poems and songs for more than forty years. His poems have been featured in numerous online and print journals, including BlazeVox, The Montucky Review, Paraphilia, Leaf Garden Press, and the late Felino Soriano’s CounterExample Poetics, for which he was a featured artist. Three volumes of poetry, Responsorials (with Constance Stadler), Silence, Inhabited, and Human &c. are available through NeoPoiesis Press (www.neopoiesispress.com. He lives with his wife Mary Ruth Alred Follett in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, where he also pursues his interests as a professional actor, singer/songwriter, playwright, and director.

red

tail lights --

she has watched them go
in rain, in snow,
with and without moonlight;
shimmering
through ebony velvet haze;
rising from summer pavement or
sparking like volcanic ash
riding sub-zero blasts
from the north
and east,
bathing the left-behind in
an aura of red-rimmed regret
even at parallax view.

.

she has watched them recede
in innocence and atrophy -
from first blush to weary womb
in every season and circumstance.

she has watched them fade
like misspent flares fired
from a doomed lifeboat.

she has watched them dwindle
through the silent,
soulless vacuum of
numberless nights:

tail lights,
leaving.

fathers,
brothers,
lovers,
sons,
others --
faces she has seen only
in profile on
the obverse of
falsely minted promises.

alone in the dark,
wondering if
(just this once)
she might see them
turn in the distance,
cresting the curve of earth to
come back to her as
pure white light,
she lets a shard of laughter
escape the taut and straining
birth canal of her throat,
realizing that she can never know …

she has watched them go
for so long now that

red

is all she sees.

copyright 2020 Rich Follett