What do you mean when you say a work in progress? What do you mean when you say give a man a fish and you’ll smell him coming a mile away? When you say a mile away do you mean a distance that never changes? An acceptable amount of spoilage? Where exactly are these parts per million you speak of? When I was a child and my mother wanted to keep me busy she would give me a tangled wind chime to untangle. Sometimes the Christmas lights were brought out in August. Like an oddly shaped building I too sometimes emit a sound in high winds. Like a cello bowed in the night. Like sand being blown across the surface of a parking lot. The jingle of keys. Now the meshing of gears begins and the great machine starts to move. Seeding the sky with smoke. Most of what we do is forgotten.
Patrick Meeds lives in Syracuse, NY and studies writing at the Syracuse YMCA’s Downtown Writer’s Center. He has been previously published in Stone Canoe literary journal, the New Ohio Review, Tupelo Quarterly, the Atticus Review, Whiskey Island, Guernica, The Pinch, and Nine Mile Review among others.
