toothbrush
by James B. Nicola
Cheeks moistened welling unexpectedly when I tossed out the Gleem-encrusted thing unused unmoved untouched one year this morning.
James B. Nicola’s poetry has appeared internationally in erbacce, Cannon’s Mouth, Recusant, Snakeskin, The South, Orbis, and Poetry Wales (UK); Innisfree and Interpreter’s House (Ireland); Poetry Salzburg (Austria), mgversion2>datura (France); Gradiva (Italy); EgoPHobia (Romania); the Istanbul Review (Turkey); Sand and The Transnational (Germany), in the latter of which his work appears in German translation; Harvests of the New Millennium (India); Kathmandu Tribune (Nepal); and Samjoko (Korea). His eight full-length collections (2014-2023) include most recently Fires of Heaven: Poems of Faith and Sense, Turns & Twists, and Natural Tendencies. His nonfiction book Playing the Audience won a Choice magazine award.