Standing there as you walked away from me that late March afternoon, in the park off Meridian Street, the spring tableau seemed such splendor of how everything was about to change, with forsythia and Japanese quince blooming everywhere and beds of daffodils already flowering on their thin green stalks, their trumpets shouting yellow daze back at the sun’s envy with such un-stoppable fierceness. Spring filling my eyes so you’d expect nature was designed, perhaps, to teach some unmistakable lesson: like love unshakable or passion returned. And I could give you again all these images of myself right up to the flowering plum tree you walked indifferently under just where I last saw you clearly. But then in a moment you were too far down the path to ever call back.

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Ed Higgins has had poems and short fiction appear in various print and online journals including: Monkeybicycle, Pindeldyboz, Tattoo Highway, Word Riot, Concho River Review, Foliate Oak, Ayris: Art & Literary Magazine, and Blue Print Review, among others. My wife and I live on a small farm in Yamhill OR, raising a menagerie of animals including two whippets, a manx barn cat (who doesn’t care for whippets), two Bourbon Red turkeys (King Strut and Nefra-Turkey), and an alpaca named Machu-Picchu. He teaches writing and literature at George Fox University.