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Welcome to Gnat Smoke Press
Gnat Smoke Press is a publication company dedicated to bringing you the finest quality poetry and fiction from John Ryland. As a southern small press, we revel in southern hospitality and great southern writing. We are unique, perhaps a little quirky, but we always aim to please. Stay a while, have a look around, just be careful which curtain you pull back. Some of them are hiding ghosts.
Annual Man
I cannot see you
across this vast expanse
that lies between us.
Separated by life and death,
but I know you are there.
Somewhere.
My sweet spring flower,
bloomed and gone,
stricken by an early frost.
I am here, but an annual man
waiting for the sun.
A perennial plight to find
a place in a world
where blooms are taken
before their day in the sun
has finished.
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