Reading, Closely
Late afternoon in the café, an old man sat alone at a corner table with his back to a sunny window, reading the Times with a magnifying glass. He held a page up & placed his lens over a story that made him shake his head & clear his throat three times. He leaned closer. Sunlight gleamed off his bald head as he lingered over each word, long enough for the page to catch on fire. His reaction to the smolder wasn’t surprise but annoyance. He slapped the widening burn without a lot of fuss. Once bits of ash settled, he looked up at me watching him & shrugged a quick hand sign.
M.J.Iuppa lives on a small farm near the shores of Lake Ontario. Her most recent poems have appeared in Poetry East, The Chariton Review, Tar River Poetry, Blueline, The Prose Poem Project, and The Centrifugal Eye, among others. Recent chapbook is As the Crows Flies (Foothills Publishing, 2008) and second full length collection, Within Reach, (Cherry Grove Collections, 2010); Forthcoming prose chapbook Between Worlds (Foothills Publishing) She is Writer-in-Residence and Director of the Visual and Performing Arts Minor program at St. John Fisher College, Rochester, NY.
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