Once at a party a man told me
he sold insurance
then asked
“and what do you do?”
“I count the fires in the sky,”
I said. “I bend my ear
to the lips of suicides.
I adopt three-legged dogs
and give royal names
to broken clocks.”
He kept his policies
to himself.
* * *
Since 1987, Charlie O’Hay’s work has appeared in over 100 literary publications including The New York Quarterly, Cortland Review, Gargoyle, West Branch, and Mudfish. In 1995, he received a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts fellowship in poetry. His first collection of poems and photographs, “Far from Luck,” was published in 2011 by Lucky Bat Books (Reno, NV) and is available in both print and Kindle formats via Amazon.com.
Contraposition 