I should like to watch the willow bend in soft wind.

I fall into the memory of the fat, dark man snoring on a bench at St Thomas Aquinas’s church in Nice.

ALBUTEROL BY THOMAS DALEY 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 128

Sitting in my parked vehicle on 300 East

the responsibilities of Thursday abandoned,

replaced by lungs itching

and wheezing, tears unrelenting,

bronchioles inflamed, unprovoked,

on the clearest of November days

unmedicated, though I shouldn’t

like to see another doctor,

I shouldn’t like to see another man

blowing hot air into a landline

though he’s polite like a beggar,

I shouldn’t like to pay another parking ticket

though I don’t mind their accumulation.

I should like to watch the willow

before me bend in soft wind

whilst I fall into the memory of the fat, dark man

snoring on a bench at St Thomas Aquinas’s

church in Nice, his frame slouched over

his lips puttering rhythmically like a horse

or some shitty lawnmower

bouncing vibrations in between

the precariously configured glass at each ear

of the crucifix, the votive candles glowing red

the tips of their flames pulled,

from all directions,

towards his nostrils for the duration

of each strained inhale, I should like

to imagine him there still, snoozing in the

purple light, I should once again like

to have the vision of every Holy Ghost

present at the time, congregating within his cranium

around a luminous cauldron, their pious hands

playing with the blue strings of his

fleur-de-lis dreams,

for as long as they’ll last.

THOMAS DALEY

In my writing I tend to enhance the smaller, unaccountable occurrences. I find as I go that I am perpetually considering and documenting the nuances of persistence. The wear and tear of days compiled, the wonderfully strange applications of the intrinsic motivator that seems to hum a sort of “keep at it” melody in the ear of life. Through great distances traveled and many atypical environments sponged, I have begun to create a body of written work that I hope will one day serve as my humble contribution to the archives of the relentless addiction to hard-fought movement.