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Tom Laughlin is a professor at Middlesex Community College in Bedford and Lowell where he teaches creative writing, literature, and composition courses, as well as coordinating a visiting writers series and open readings for students, faculty, and community members. Prior to that, he coordinated an early academic intervention program at Massasoit Community College in Brockton and taught literature classes in two Massachusetts prisons. He was a founding editor of Vortext, a literary journal of Massasoit Community College, and a volunteer staff reader for many years for Ploughshares. His poetry and fiction have appeared in Ibbetson Street, Green Mountains Review, Drunk Monkeys, Sand Hills Literary Magazine, The Blue Mountain Review, Superpresent Magazine, Hare’s Paw Literary Journal, Molecule, North Essex Review, and elsewhere. He has also published academic articles in Teaching English in the Two-Year College and elsewhere, as well an annual calendar, Stone Balancing at Walden Pond, featuring photos of his stone balancing. The Rest of the Way, a book of his poetry, is being released by Finishing Line Press in July. He has been known to hike hills like Great Blue Hill on full moon nights. More of his work can be found at TomLaughlinPoet.com.

Mistress

Tom Laughlin

she arrives quietly every month
catching me unaware
outside my office door
dusk quickly spreading on my way to car, home
the sight of her distracts me
the night’s air warm and musky
damp from a week’s ground-soaking rain

my car, too, conspires
finds the too-familiar darkened lot
my footsteps soundless, fearful
feeling now toward the concealed path
the gnarled protection of ancient limbs
long versed in such escapades
smiling at these pungent urges

as I climb steadily
pulse throbbing at my temples
she whispers through the pines
winking suggestively between splayed branches
behind, beside
around the distant beyond of
this great dark hill

so I find myself here again
atop a craggy-faced rock
gazing at her naked glory
bright and unabashed
ever the tease, hovering beside Orion’s belt
and laughing now
with this pale and hungry lunatic

— Tom Laughlin