Chris Stubenrauch




Some people have the privilege of being remembered only as a young person. I am one of those people. I predicted my early death and knew I was going to be right. I didn’t want to be an adult anyway, wasn’t going to be good at it. It helps too to be a gambler. I said only a few things in my life very clearly and one of those things was about my death. The irony, of course, was that I wasn’t going to have the opportunity to see it play out. My ego may have been too inflated for the public good, probably. I called up everyone I had hurt, made all of the amends. I put all of my remaining chips on it. The insurance would pay out as a lump sum. My cells underneath were turning red, red-brown, and red again. My heavy legs, slipping over themselves in the air. Tea by morning, Triscuits alone in the dark. Never enough oxygen, and always alone in the dark. It was hard to stay positive, so everything became a joke. The body is doing what it was designed to do. I pleaded with God: maybe it’s just a bad design. Can we start over from the beginning? When everything became funny again, I realized the circle was closing. “It is what he would have wanted,” they will say. They didn’t really take the time to get to know me anyway, the girls were always packing it in early. There’s more in my body that you’re not seeing, that I just can’t explain clearly with words. I’m sure you’re tired of hearing about it, and trust me, I am too. My body just a ghost in the back seat, we drove up Dodge the wrong way just to see if they’d chase after us. I laughed with them all the way to the bank.





Chris Stubenrauch is a space cowboy and sometimes-poet from near Baltimore, Maryland. He is the editor-in-chief of Prairie Home Magazine and Space Weather Watch, an educational space weather outreach page. His most recent release, Headwinds, was published in November 2023 and his work has previously appeared in High Plains Register and Bullshit Lit. His favorite poet is the late Charles Simic.