Across Balter Beerworks at the corner of Jackson & Broadway, Knoxville, TN Patio twilight subdues the golden backdrop of a glass of pale ale, each bubble lifting through the silk glow as if reaching for the stars. Beer slips past my lips that are momentarily silent but questions still effervesce without answers. Sometimes, in the quiet lull of a waning summer day, philosophy merges with that silence and creates its own music ... or cacophony. Across the street, between the hush of cars I hear the haunts of a repossessed building, its brick no longer in the agony of neglect but quickened from deep piles, dusty with crumbled history along with busted plaster and rotting lumber—a warehouse of memories that once lit up the downtown sidewalk with its collage of tiffany lamps imputing character to the hundred-year-old building. And now, reprieved, its eyes literally windows to its soul, reflecting assurance in the afterglow of the sun— glass on fire breathing hope. I take another sip, my glass bathed in the same radiant light full of intoxicating promise, glints into the mirror of my own eyes, my own philosophies whispering partial answers to those rising questions of mortality and resurrection.
John C. Mannone has poems in Windhover, North Dakota Quarterly, Poetry South, Baltimore Review, and others. He won the Impressions of Appalachia Creative Arts Contest in poetry (2020), the Carol Oen Memorial Fiction Prize (2020), and the Joy Margrave Award (2015, 2017) for creative nonfiction. He was awarded a Jean Ritchie Fellowship (2017) in Appalachian literature and served as the celebrity judge for the National Federation of State Poetry Societies (2018). His full-length collections are Disabled Monsters (Linnet’s Wings Press, 2015), Flux Lines: The Intersection of Science, Love, and Poetry (Linnet’s Wings Press, 2021), Sacred Flute (Iris Press, 2022), and Song of the Mountains (Middle Creek Publishing, 2023). He edits poetry for Abyss & Apex and other journals. A physics professor at Alice Lloyd College, John lives in southeast Kentucky.
