Moments. by Don Robishaw

It’s the smell of freedom on strangers that draws me to them. Can the smell of not expecting much from life be described? Is it the odor: that stench of beer or whiskey-laden breaths? Is it the shakes, the sweat, the refusal to look a stranger in the eye the next morning in bed? Ah, the whiff of a real drinkin’ woman or man. I long for those moments, yet have come to realize there is a bottom -- and when I look in the mirror --  it looks a lot like me. Drink, it’s here for me when there’s no one else. When nothing else works, there’s drinking. There’s nothing, nothing else like it. Need a drink? Four blocks away, cross the Three Rivers Bridge over the bottomless River,

and there’s the Dew Drop Inn. I look over the side. I have three choices. I close my eyes. The struggle continues; today I’m drawn back over the bridge, towards those moments.

Before Don Robishaw stopped working to write, he ran educational programs for homeless shelters for thirteen years. Don's also well-traveled, using various ways and means: Sailor, Peace Corps Volunteer, bartender, hitchhiker, world traveler, college professor, and circus roustabout.

His work has recently appeared in The Rye Whiskey Review, Drunk Monkeys, O’ Dark Thirty, Literary Orphans, Crack-the-Spine, The Remembered Arts, Open: Journal of Arts and Letters, Flash Fiction Magazine, and others. His chapbook, ‘Willie’s Bad Paper Odyssey’ was a semi-finalist in Digging Through The Fat Press 2018 Summer Chapbook Contest.

He like to write poetry, satire, tragedies, and gritty fictional tales — of men and women from various backgrounds — that may have sprouted from a seed, from his past.

Many of the characters he developed have been homeless, served for periods of time in the military, or are based upon archetypes or sterotypes he's met while on the road.