Amateur Grief: poems by Ron Mohring. Number 11 in our ReBound Series. Originally selected by Maureen Seaton for the Frank O’Hara Chapbook Prize and published by Thorngate Road in 1998, now in a new edition with cover art by the author.

Publication:  June 5, 2020 [100 copies]
ISBN: 978-1-949333-73-2
23 pages
$ 9.00 — click here to purchase

Ron Mohring‘s have appeared most recently in such journals as Assaracus, diode, Glass Poetry Journal, Impossible Archetype, Lambda Literary, One, Under a Warm Green Linden, and the HIV Here and Now Project. He has served as the Philip Roth Writer in Residence and the Stadler Fellow at Bucknell University, where he taught composition and creative writing. His other chapbooks are Beneficence (Pecan Grove), The David Museum (DIAGRAM Press), and Touch Me Not (Two Rivers Review); his full-length collection, Survivable World, won the Washington Prize and was published by The Word Works. Ron lives in Cincinnati, where he manages Seven Kitchens Press, and is currently working on several manuscripts, including a collaboration with the poet Ed Madden.

Losses

The mouse discovered in the sweater drawer 
does not wrestle with decisions. Before
I’ve reached the attic and brought down

a box suitable for transfer, she’s gone.
The rubbery pink babies wriggle, blind.
What now? I’m frozen by her stark response,

resist its blunt efficiency. I don’t need
the sweater, don’t even like it. I’ll go without.
I want her to come back, carry them off

as a mama cat nips her young by their necks,
trots away dangling their limp bodies. Her 
lesson’s clear: Cut your losses, begin again.

Purchase your copy here. Thanks so much for supporting our ReBound Series!