Doug Ramspeck, Third Place winner of Narrative’s 2024 Winter Story Contest, is the author of numerous poetry collections, including Blur (World Works, 2023), winner of the Tenth Gate Prize; one short story collection; and a novella. He is a retired professor of English from the Ohio State University and lives in Black Mountain, North Carolina.

Statues

by Doug Ramspeck

I used to watch the old men
fishing sometimes in the river
behind the house, the stillness
of their bodies an inventory,

like they were counting down
the few years they had left.
And sometimes the old men held
their fishing poles like divinations,


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