Old Reporter

I have the typos again: My hands clack-clack-clack, like an A.P. wire machine before the era of creamy computer hums; my eyes, once as sharp as a layout-editor’s X-Acto blade, feel linty, blinking away gray dust floating in dim fluorescence; my synapses are as slow as a Sunday morning newspaper newsroom, which is where I sit now, alone, in sepia, with stale mail on my desk and my obituary on my mind. I wonder: Will I ever be able to write again without abusing metaphor and simile, let alone time?









Nick D'Annunzio Jones is a poet in Seattle. In previous lives, he has been a media and politics lecturer at the University of Technology in Sydney, Australia; a Zen Buddhist chaplain’s assistant in a South Florida prison; a New York Times reporter and a Wall Street speechwriter. His poems have been published in or are forthcoming from Treehouse, Monarch Review, Evergreen Review, Gargoyle, the Rio Grande Review and numerous other journals in the United States and abroad. He earned an MFA from the University of California at Riverside, an experience he loathed.