When they said he has left the building, nobody suspected it would be for greener pastures. Note to Mojo: Elvis isn’t everywhere — he’s residing off rural route 56 in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, occupying an outbuilding on the Ebert’s farm property, keeping a low profile and becoming proficient with hand tools and the neighbor’s daughter, only one of which comes unexpected. The farmer’s wife, gawking out the kitchen window of their Airstream, can’t help but mention how good he looks in white coveralls, even when he’s at his most filthy, shaking and shimmying off his grime. She envisions his compost pitchfork as a stand-up microphone – the sows squealing and Holsteins clamoring for his attention. Say what you will about a man worse for wear, he still knows how to make the females swoon, even with newly calloused hands, right down to the feisty barn cats, their backs swelling in black waves of excitement with his tender stroke, a moment both touching and pathetic as he fades deeper into the rural twilight.
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Thad DeVassie’s poems and prose poems have appeared in New York Quarterly, Sentence: A Journal of Prose Poetics, North American Review, Poetry East, West Branch, NANO Fiction, PANK, and Sycamore Review among others. A lifelong Ohioan, he runs a communications consulting firm in Columbus.
the museum of americana: A LITERARY REVIEW 