John Riley

Bio: John Riley has published poetry and fiction in Smokelong Quarterly, Oddball Magazine, Connotation Press, Fiction Daily, The Molotov Cocktail, Dead Mule, St. Anne's Review, Better Than Starbucks, and many other anthologies and journals both online and in print. He lives in Greensboro, NC, where he works in educational publishing.

Bedrock

It wasn't a question of how deep he'd have to digto find water but what he'd go through to get therefor there were stone shelves as well as waterbelow the dirt surface, shelves that stretched acrossthis county and the next county and on, built outlong before there were counties or nationsor even an old man and a young man to standaround the auger and pace their wordsin the summer heat, before summers existedand the stone boiled and rolled and perhapslonged to adhere for who knows when the wantcame, the need, when the magnets appearedamidst all the clinging and spinning,and now the old farmer, who had livedon the seventy-nine-and-one-half acres his entireeighty-two years, sighed not-yet toothlessly at the necessity and shook hands with the well-drillerwho would return next week to pour his skilldown the slanted well, calculated to maneuverbetween the loam and the shelves of slate and gneiss.

Another Time

Crows are gathering above the ghostof their wizened elder with the hardened beakand we are again lost and walkingsteadily across the brown trinityof gully and marsh and sun-carpeted hill,speaking no more of windmills,our hearts wordlessly steeled bythe impossibility of again embracingwithin the thick, loping shadows.
Inside or outside the darkyou were already gone, I recall,sitting here with the mealy-mouthedconsequence of sleep, of dreams,of remembering how we dreadedour approaching nights, watchingsunsets from old stairs, a gasping fishlingering in the air between us,how the wise men who visitedhad not a stitch of music sewninto their vestments—calculation,only calculation, sealed their buttons—how our fingers intertwinedwhen the door shut.

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