The Wreck of the S.S. Wheeler #32

     Which oughtta do it.

     Still, if folks would like to read more about these characters, the badger, the frog, and the mouse first showed up during the composition of my collection Plague Year Poems. Those are the 443 daily poems I wrote from March 22, 2020 till June 7, 2021, while the public library where I work was closed to the public for the coronavirus pandemic. The link in the previous sentence will take an interested reader to the entire collection's table of contents, but for the abovementioned characters, the badger first appears in a sequence that starts with poem #149 from August 17th, 2020 and runs for another 12 or 13 poems.

     She then returns when I'm considering quitting the daily poem thing at the one-year mark. That sequence starts with poem #337 from February 21st, 2021 and crashes on through to the actual first anniversary of the the whole thing on March 21st, 2021. Spoiler alert: I did indeed keep writing daily poems till the beginning of June, 2021.

     All those poems are free to read on the web, but if you'd like to buy a copy on paper and put a little cash in my pocket, this page at Amazon.com will set you up with a version wrapped in some extremely wonderful artwork provided by my brother Tom. The cost? One thin ten-dollar bill...plus tax, shipping, and handling, I suppose.

     As for the fly, she first appears in my currently-available-to-purchase collection Two Strikes and I'm Out from Island of Wak Wak Books, and the crow is new to this collection. I feel certain that we'll be seeing more of her and the rest of these folks for as long as I'm still stumbling around among the living.

     And that only leaves me to paraphrase Jimmy Durante and say, "Good night, Traci Briery, wherever you are..."

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