_____

 

 

“Miles & Me”

slash here
semi-colon there
dash and a
period
comma down to
colon
lead me back
to quotes
and now I’m on my way
exclaiming
with a question mark
the dangling of
a phrase prepositionalized
by the unscathed glamour
of italics
underlined in bold
and a made-up
word
that won’t show up
on
spell-check
leaving me
hyphenated and compounded
by the end of this
Miles Davis
number,
that fragments, then unfolds
into a
run-on sentence,
just
like
incorrect grammar.

 

“Uh-huh, Oh Yeah”

She said she liked
jazz and jump and
jive and swing and
as if to add more emphasis
Uh-huh
she even included
the blues

Oh yeah,
I said
as I raised one eyebrow,
That’s real cool

 

 

__________

Originally from the Chicagoland area, Dan Franch has lived and taught in America, Africa, and Europe. He’s backpacked around the world, been in the Marine Corps, the Peace Corps, and worked for OSCE in Bosnia after the war. A former newspaper columnist and cartoonist in Luxembourg, Dan now lives in Estonia where he is a school principal.