Textures by Ahrend Torrey

Do we only live when the big promotion is given?

Do we only live when the awful day comes, and the ambulance arrives,
and everyone’s gathered around our loved one?

Do we only live on exciting vacations to foreign countries?

     Or

do we also live when we don’t realize we’re living at all—between
big memories?

—Like now, Deek and Dova are tearing up the grass,
are chasing each other’s tail,

and Purl (my cat) is peering up the storm door
at a tree frog
stuck to the glass.

My husband just stepped from his office: we ate hummus together,
during his fifteen-minute /break/ from class.

Do these textures also make up living? Of course,
let us feel them—

I’m learning they’re quickest to wear away.
They never last.



Ahrend Torrey is the author of Ripples (Pinyon Publishing, 2023), Bird City, American Eye (Pinyon Publishing, 2022) and Small Blue Harbor (Poetry Box Select, 2019). His work has appeared in storySouth, The Greensboro Review, and The Perch (a journal of the Yale Program for Recovery and Community Health, a program of the Yale School of Medicine), among others. He earned his MA/MFA in creative writing from Wilkes University in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, and is a recipient of the Etruscan Prize awarded by Etruscan Press. He lives in Chicago with his husband Jonathan, their two rat terriers Dichter and Dova, and Purl their cat.