After The Fact

Our secrets are on sale but just won’t tip the scale however close we hold the cards, however, hearing bells, in post and rope and canvas corners into yellow plastic buckets we spit out however many perfect teeth. The self serve copier is jammed, the workroom door ajar, the self no doubt at home by now and off the clock and on the couch and watching Law and Order reruns and lamenting that on technicalities the perpetrators always walk.

Heikki Huotari is a retired professor of mathematics. In a past century, he attended a one-room country school and spent summers on a forest-fire lookout tower. His poems have appeared in journals such as Poetry Northwest and Crazyhorse. A chapbook is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press.