November 2022 - Featured Artist - Tom Laughlin

About the Artist

Tom Laughlin is a professor at Middlesex Community College where he teaches creative writing, literature, and composition courses, as well as coordinating a visiting writers series and open readings for their creative writing program. He was a founding editor of Vortext, a literary journal of Massasoit Community College, a volunteer staff reader for many years for Ploughshares, and he has taught literature classes in two Massachusetts prisons. His poetry has appeared in Green Mountains Review, Ibbetson Street, Drunk Monkeys, Sand Hills Literary Magazine, Blue Mountain Review, Superpresent Magazine, Molecule, and elsewhere. His poetry chapbook, The Rest of the Way, was published by Finishing Line Press in August 2022. His website is www.TomLaughlinPoet.com

Featured Piece - Mistress

she arrives quietly every month
catching me unaware
outside my office door
dusk quickly spreading on my way to car, home
the sight of her distracts me
the night’s air warm and musky
damp from a week’s ground-soaking rain

my car, too, conspires
finds the too-familiar darkened lot
my footsteps soundless, fearful
feeling now toward the concealed path
the gnarled protection of ancient limbs
long versed in such escapades
smiling at these pungent urges

as I climb steadily
pulse throbbing at my temples
she whispers through the pines
winking suggestively between splayed branches
behind, beside
around the distant beyond of
this great dark hill

so I find myself here again
atop a craggy-faced rock
gazing at her naked glory
bright and unabashed
ever the tease, hovering beside Orion’s belt
and laughing now
with this pale and hungry lunatic