All great jazz players stop here first in after-life: the Swansong Island Lounge. McCoy’s coming soon; the Steinway might not survive his hammer-handed tenure.

After it goes, no more instruments. Silence.

God installed these mechanisms,
walked away, and let be be.

West of the Moon, notes carrying over shoreline surf

Todd Mercer won the Woodstock Writers Festival’s Flash Fiction contest and took 2nd and 3rd place of the Kent County Dyer-Ives Prizes. His chapbook Box of Echoes won the Michigan Writers Cooperative Press contest. Mercer’s poetry and fiction appears in The Lake, Mobius: The Journal of Social Change, Thema, Blue Collar Review, Right Hand Pointing, Apocrypha & Abstractions, Cease, Cows, Dunes Review and Eunoia Review.f