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  • The Telemarketer’s Husband, Unemployed, Kills Time in a Café, Waiting to Pick Her Up
  • Gabriel Welsch (bio)

A succession of curvaceous housewives strolls in, drawing with them creamy visions of afternoon languor in sparse bedrooms in ranch houses at the back of drought-stricken lawns— the unusual which might fit a day's shadowed caverns. I sit humbled by them, how their allure only appears to those old enough, settled and no longer twitching with it, to those still enough to smell the softness in their shadows. I imagine how they will move to the phone when it rings, how their disappointment at my wife's voice will ripen, outspoken as an orange. How I will know some of what they feel. How a hand cradles time like fruit.

Gabriel Welsch

Gabriel Welsch’s other non-telecommunications-industry-oriented poems appear in Harvard Review, 5AM, Spoon River Poetry Review, Chautauqua Literary Journal, Crab Orchard Review and other journals. His short stories are found in Georgia Review, New Letters, Ascent, Mid-American Review and elsewhere. In 2003, he received a Pennsylvania Arts Council Individual Artist’s Fellowship for Fiction, and in 2002 he was the inaugural Thoreau Poet in Residence at the Toledo Botanical Garden.

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