Ed Higgins


Old Man Williams

farts again like thunder on steroids.

Eighty years old and most of his teeth
gone to some fancy epoxy replacement

he can’t even name. He’s most comfortable
raising his ass off the recliner during

the evening news hour to clear away
all the damn smoke and bad air

the rest of the world brings
into his living room nowadays.


the heart as a small dog

what else can i do
but with a stick
drive this small dog
love out of myself?

huddled against the cardiac
wall barking at me with
shrill arrhythmic beat


Bottoms up

Most people sleep-walk through life, said Heraclitus, who himself was forever stepping into rushing streams where mud, roe, small fish sometimes, fallen leaves sunk to the bottom, wild ideas and such, would stick to his sandals. Which he didn’t remove or even seem to mind at all. All things being one to him. But according to both Plato and Aristotle, Heraclitus was little more than a whack job, leading him to logical incoherence from the bottom of his soles, up.


Ed Higgins' poems and short fiction have appeared in Duck & Herring Co.'s Pocket Field Guide, Monkeybicycle, Pindeldyboz, and Bellowing Ark, as well as the online journals Lily, Cross Connect, Word Riot, The Centrifugal Eye, and Red River Review, among others.

He lives on a small farm in Yamhill, Oregon with a menagerie of animals including a rescued potbelly pig named Odious, & teaches writing and literature at George Fox University, south of Portland.

 
 
 
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