My poetry has been published in many web and print magazines, some of which include: Tryst, The Exquisite Corpse, Melic Review, The Green Tricycle, Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, MIPO, and many others. I have been an Honorable Mention recipient at NPAC and IBPC.

Dave Ruslander lives in rural Virginia where he is retired from the working class and now spends his days as a gentleman farmer and writer. In keeping the with quasi-accurate sweeping generalization that southerners are slow, Dave did not begin writing until the age of 50.

Insight

I passed him everyday
though I never lingered -
he saddened me.

Despite his winter rose skin
and mouth of few grinders,
his eyes shone –
not from wine or illness

but of knowing.
Wrapped in ragged clothes
he loomed
in that graffiti tattooed stairway

shouting
at the bustle that was us
until, like litter on the streets,
he became,
unnoticed.

I can’t say why
my ear was attentive
to his laconic tongue that day
when he said,
“Now is all there is.”