About twice a year, life pokes me right between the eyes, eliminating the 29 graying hairs that form my unibrow. Like today, my first book fair, where I’m hawking my three strikingly different tomes (my latent ADHD no doubt). But the odd truth is that here at the Athens Comic Fair I’ve sold more gourmet venison cookbooks than graphic novels, and I’m perplexed by the apparently invisible connection between venison cookery and the ink and cosplay of most attendees. Okay, that’s snarky and side-eyed; I apologize. So, my just published volume of poetry abuts graphic novel and cookbook, old, straight, married, white-guy stuff, spiced and colored with the usual dogwood and azalea free verse—a life in toto wrapped up in 112 pages—and it’s now hour four, my energy flat as the new blacktop on Milledge Heights, but I’ve made table and parking fees, so who can complain? Et voila, she walks by and I notice her tote inscribed with la phrase juste for everything everywhere, right? Witness the evanescent, and transitory nature of all matter, corporeal or not: life, literature, art, and music, all take that last, lung-filling breath, and then—the final swoosh of nothingness.

Sooner, rather than later—we’re all part of the burn pile.

Gary Grossman,

Professor Emeritus of Ecology at University of Georgia, has poetry published in 38 literary reviews, creative nonfiction in Tamarind Literary Magazine, and flash fiction and poetry in MacQueen’s Quinterly, which nominated his microfiction “Mindfulness” for the Best Small Fictions 2023 anthology.

For 10 years Gary wrote the “Ask Dr. Trout” column for American Angler. His first poetry book, Lyrical Years, is available from Kelsay Press, and his second, What I Meant to Say Was..., will be released by Impspired Press (~December 2023). His graphic novel My Life in Fish: One Scientist’s Journey is available from: http://www.garygrossman.net/my-life-in-fish-one-scientists-journey/

Author’s website: www.garygrossman.net

And his writing blog: https://garydavidgrossman.medium.com/