Associate poetry editor Karl Schroeder on today's bonus poem: In every space, there are invisible currents: dust, rising and swirling, colliding and falling, collecting in corners. We too, have our own corners. In “Ground War,” Kevin Weidner subtly and elegantly peels off the veil over things we neglect in the nonchalance of habit: a dirty toenail, a single serving butter—and exposes the silent collisions we face every day we and our corners are put on display.
Keep an eye out for more work from Weidner in the upcoming print issue of Passages North.
Ground War
Days later, nothing has changed,
but my toenails have a crescent moon
of dirt underneath them. I know
they should be clipped. I know I
should clip them. When everyone
around you does one thing, isn’t it
hard to do another? This morning
at the café downtown, the waitress
brought me my bagel and set it
on the table and glanced at my sandaled
foot, where it dangled from my leg crossed
over the other, and noted my toenails,
I could tell, noted well the dirt, and I said
thank you and pulled back the top
on the single serving butter. I set my feet
squarely on the floor. I don’t know if
I’ll ever see her again, but probably I will.
It is a café I go to often.
Kevin Weidner lives in Brattleboro, Vermont, and received an MFA in creative writing from the University of Alabama. His other poems, stories, and reviews have been or will be in Southeast Review, Ruminate, storySouth, Yalobusha Review, and The Hairsplitter, among others.
