Tether
for Audrey Marie Louise Heerdink
Drifting out of this reality toward the curtain
mainly young children and pets can witness,
I slip into the gray matter reflected
when you gaze into another’s eyes.
Holding place for wanderers and thinkers
like me, the genesis of meaning beckons
the living to become displaced.
Astral projection with deceased persons
takes more tolls than the Bunker Hill
Memorial Bridge when you’ve forgotten
to turn and circle back through
the tunnel of lost commuters.
If it weren’t for the angelic voice
my daughter uses to call out
for daddy, I’d still be floating
off somewhere I don’t belong
around people who desire
claim and harm
if they don’t get their way.
What’s Left Over from a Haunting
Enter the shell which
used to be called home
long before you held your baby girl,
after the city
forced a relocation;
an attempt at a new beginning.
This structure,
walls where love lived
while another force sat
dormant at the end of your bed,
watching sleeping occupants
as breath came and went.
For half a decade,
the belief that residual apparitions
after an intervention of biblical measure
found peace like
troubled children
when the tired parent finally notices
they’ve gone missing.
A twelve gauge meant to claim
an entire family
but only took the father
who forgot the first rule
of self-preservation
still resides upstairs
along with the man who knocks
constantly on the plaster.
He’s waiting for his loved ones
to come home.
Bio: Tim Heerdink is the author of Somniloquy & Trauma in the Knottseau Well, The Human Remains, Red Flag and Other Poems, Razed Monuments, Checking Tickets on Oumaumua, Sailing the Edge of Time, I Hear a Siren’s Call, Ghost Map, A Cacophony of Birds in the House of Dread, and short stories, The Tithing of Man and HEA-VEN2. His poems appear in various journals and anthologies. He is the President of Midwest Writers Guild of Evansville, Indiana.
Fevers of the Mind 
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