is what Jeanie told me to use for a prompt. It could have been don’t eat the glass I embedded in the poem. Or poems made out of glass should never throw stones. The problem is my ears. Well, my hearing—my ears are fine as they are on the outside. But I digress. Where was I? Oh yes. My hearing is bad. No, my hearing is for scheiße. And I often spout malapropisms because of what I think I hear (which is often [almost always]) not what has been said. Words swim in and out of my ears; their pronunciations changing with the tide—the pull of the moon. Malapropisms is not the right word. Malahearisms maybe? Malapropism sounds like an amoeba or other tiny life form we almost never think about unless it’s making us sick. But, wait. Poems. Glass. What was that about? Don’t let the poem hit you in the glass on the way out the door? It seems like a lifetime ago: that I heard, that the glass of my hearing was more than half full, that a poem came paddling its solo canoe over the smooth or wave-lashed water, docking on my shore, saying, “here I am.”

The glass, by the way, doesn’t give a toot whether it is half full (of wine, or of water), all the way full or some quantum in between. The glass is just being glass.

These days Steve Tomasko dreams of being a retired old guy in a boat, fishing by himself (or, that’s what his wife Jeanie said she once pictured him doing). Instead, he occasionally scribbles words when not panicked about the coming A.I. apocalypse.