With him, the buzzards never even stood a chance. Some here at the senior facility think he likely consumed one or more tainted chili dogs outside on the Fourth of July—it was only 104° out. He watched the entertainment, complained of a stomach ache. Someone gave him some Pepto-Bismol which did nothing, so he simply went to his room, got into bed, and died in his sleep the next day at 97—“with his boots on,” as they say down here.

negative space
on a king-size mattress
the shape of a man

I was told The Glass Key was playing on his big-screen TV when they got there. I think William Bendix was in that movie. He really liked William Bendix; kind of resembled the big bruiser. Anyway, now I’m down in San Antone, sitting in his cluttered apartment to sift through and clear away nearly a century’s worth of a man’s life. Today I came across a small, antique, wooden coyote caller in a dresser drawer among the socks, some social security and Medicare papers, and a stack of dated cell-phone contracts. I threw out the papers and kept the coyote caller for myself because, sure as shootin’, that was him.

squashed armadillo
Mother Nature’s way
of downsizing

Antique coyote call photographed by Mark Meyer.
Copyrighted © 2023 by the artist. All rights reserved.

Mark Meyer

is a poet, contemporary visual artist, and retired educator who lives in the Seattle area and describes himself this way: “ex-scientist/ quasi-artist/ semi-poet/ pseudo-guitarist/ meta-misanthrope.” Now in his seventies, he was a neurobiologist in a prior lifetime long ago—and still really misses looking through microscopes.

Mark’s short-form poetry has been widely published, and he is the author of two collections of selected poetry and artwork published by 3dotstudio: Old Flames & Burned Bridges (2023) and neo-Nothyngge (2020).

His paintings, drawings, and digital prints continue his interest in pattern-driven compositions, richly detailed, leaving almost no space unaddressed. As he says, “...there are no big plans or schemes in my work... it’s simply enough to find out where these individual small ‘experiments’ lead me.” His artworks are inspired by scientific, societal, psychological, and theological considerations, reflecting the complex and frenetic condition of our contemporary culture.

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡Featured Works by Mark Meyer at Davidson Galleries (Seattle, Washington)

⚡(±)-2-Methyl-1,2,3,4,10,14b-hexahydropyrazino[2,1-a]pyrido[2,3-c][2]benzazepine, haibun in Issue 18 of MacQueen’s Quinterly (April 2023)

⚡A dozen of Meyer’s haiga and poems appear in previous issues of MacQ; see Index of Contributors for the list.