A few years back, a friend of mine interviewed me for an article in the local paper. I wrote a short poem to be included with the article, but always felt there was more to be said on the subject. I was a newspaper carrier for five years in Moline, Illinois. During the winter, I always found it interesting that the bundles were warm when I slid my freezing hands between the copies. I imagined this was because they were “hot off the press” and used that to build the short poem. That poem appears in paragraph 5 of this expanded prose piece that hopefully shares one of those cold snowy days in the life of a paperboy.
At 38th Street and 5th Avenue we waited, braced away from the whistle of winds as they whipped down the straightaway, hidden in the evergreen wrapped round twin pines – salvation amongst the thorny branches where we looked out for the truck to arrive.
