The music melts deadbolt ice.
Half-frozen hermits drink beer and eat ham sitting
on folding chairs and couches held up by 2X4s.
Orange extension cords are streamers decorating
the rafters with bottle cap snakes,
year-round Christmas lights, and five
foosball players on a skewer. The only new
things in the building are the dings, dents,
and missing bricks. The crowd of drunken
werewolves are howling for another song.
Two taxidermied antelope heads whisper to each other.
They argue about what the banjo player’s slurred lyrics meant.
Wrendolyn Klotzko loves Black-Capped Chickadees in Eastern Red Cedars and the elderly Adirondack Mountains that cradle her hometown. She misses them while studying Creative Writing, English, and Education at SUNY Oswego. Still, she thinks it is worth it for the opportunities of having her work appear in the Gandy Dancer, Deep Wild Journal, the Nature State of Mind anthology, and more, while also serving as the Editor-in-Chief of the Great Lake Review. Wrendolyn, when she isn’t writing, loves listening to snow fall, interpreting the patterns of her chipped nail polish, and thinking of all the cats she’ll have one day.