I Can Get By
Pasque Press Poetry Collection, 2026
Considering my age (mid-80’s) I thought Duet in the Little Blue Church would be my last book. I accepted that but began to be lonely for writing. One evening I was sitting next to a bookcase, reached up and pulled out Louis Jenkins’s Nice Fish.
His prose poems lured me in. I’d been thinking about a tie between me and my birthplace in South Dakota, make it a full circle, and the prose poem style seemed to fit it naturally. I’d unknowingly adopted the “I can get by” attitude in the Dakotas; the poems took off from there. The prose poems in this new (last?) book turned out to be funny and sad, hopeful and insightful.
From I Can Get By:
To the Reader
Sometimes I suddenly feel close to a relative, long absent from my daily mind, long dead, like my mom’s sister, Aunt Hilda. This morning I looked up from my papers and saw her clearly. Her lips primly pressed together as if she were striding to the kitchen to heat us up a can of chicken noodle soup for lunch. “Aunt Hilda,” I said, “do you think I’ll ever get this finished?”
Without ado she said, “Yes,” and disappeared into the unseeable.
I entered the m.s. in a contest I saw advertised via the South Dakota State Poetry Society. Mine and another poet’s m.s.s. were chosen for publication.