The Great Lonely, Joseph S. Pete

In the video store night after night,
perusing The Salton Sea, Orange County, Mulholland Drive,
all the same shit, all the same familiar covers scarred into your retinas
from lonely visit after lonely visit
to this empty void of a sad sack video rack
in a fluorescent-lit gas station on the edge of this woebegone town.


All the settings always seemed to be Southern California,
vistas you would never espy on your own,
that you’d later realize were all lazy jaunts around greater LA,
a town of stars but no fireflies illuminating a languid summer night.


Night after night, you scanned
the statically graphic faces of other people’s stories,
the artifice of coastal desert conjurers,
never seeing anything
worth checking out,
never seeing anything
that stirred you out of your everyday inertia,
your stagnancy of gas stations, diners, dives,
all the usual haunts that swallowed your lonely, capsized days.

© Joseph S. Pete

Joseph S. Pete is an award-winning journalist, an Iraq War veteran, an Indiana University graduate, a book reviewer for a national magazine, a photographer, and a frequent guest on Lakeshore Public Radio. He is a 2017 Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee who has read his work for the Fictitious series on the iO Theater stage, had a play staged at the Detroit Heritage Theatre Festival, showcased his photography at the Oddtropolis Art Show in San Francisco and was named the poet laureate of Chicago BaconFest, a feat that Geoffrey Chaucer chump never accomplished. His literary or photographic work has appeared in more than 100 journals, including The Tipton Poetry Journal, Chicago Literati, Dogzplot, Proximity Magazine, Stoneboat, The High Window, Synesthesia Literary Journal, Steep Street Journal, Beautiful Losers, New Pop Lit, The Grief Diaries, Gravel, The Offbeat, Oddball Magazine, The Perch Magazine, Bull Men’s Fiction, Rising Phoenix Review, Thoughtful Dog, shufPoetry, The Roaring Muse, Prairie Winds, Blue Collar Review, The Rat’s Ass Review, Euphemism, Jenny Magazine, Vending Machine Press and elsewhere. Like Bartleby, he would prefer not to.

Leave a Reply

13 + twelve =

  • Post comments:0 Comments