I was an orphan once. Lucky me it can’t happen twice. The story was my parents were a dime and a penny. She wore a long, elegant coat with a belt. He was a gun misfiring, or an empty suitcase. I can’t remember.

We played baseball in the yard behind the building. I remember. There was a runner at first, two outs. The batter was behind on the count. Our team felt lifted into the summer air. The pitcher looked into the clouds. He dropped the ball in the dirt, walked to the fence, opened the gate and disappeared. I lived in left field.

One morning I thought I saw them passing by in a car. They looked like two competing geometric shapes. Two hotel guest keys. Two identical planks of wood. She wore the sky as a hat. He held a bird in his mouth. A little struggle still in the wings.

Jeffrey Hermann’s poetry and prose has appeared in Rejection Lit, Variant,
UCity Reivew, trampset, JMWW, The Shore, and other publications. Though
less publicized, he finds his work as a father and husband to be rewarding
beyond measure.