Brian Mosher is a regular contributor to Esoterica Magazine. You can read his story, When Rose Met James Michael here and In Yorktown, Her Name is Sharon here. While we don’t often publish poetry, we do support our authors and are in awe of Mosher’s new book of poetry, Relict.
Relict is the result of the author’s struggle to figure out what the death of his father meant to him. Does a person become something different on the day they no longer have any living parents? A child becomes an adolescent, becomes an adult. A single person becomes part of a couple, becomes a parent, becomes again single either as a widow or through divorce. But we have no word for the stage of life that begins once both a person’s parents have died. This book is an attempt to document the feelings of grief, and to reconnect to a lost past through stories about ancestors, all without losing sight of a hopeful future. This title will be released on January 23, 2026. You can pre-order here.
My Uncles, My Father, and Me
We sit in a circle of green plastic lawn chairs
in what Don, my youngest uncle, calls,
“The meeting that never ends.”
Red-faced with the humiliation of divorce,
I feel a child among these men
for whom vows are always kept,
and bear witness to their quiet ritual
beneath an ancient maple.
They recall long since chopped down apple trees,
a hammock hung between;
berries which grew wild here
in what Ray, my father, calls, “the war years,”
as if there ever were a year without a war.
He reminds me, “This was the big war. Everything
was different. Ford even stopped making cars.”
And the house, this house of their lives,
built by hand, the foundation hole dug
with a horse and a wooden scoop,
blood and sweat in every board and nail.
I feel connected to them,
through them, yet,
it is a slender thread.
As they each leave this life,
the thread grows thinner.
I recall all this years later,
now the family’s oldest living man,
a lesser man among the ghosts of greater.
 | A guest post by
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Thank you Leah!