Joel Glover - Fighting That Feeling of Purposelessness
The Friday Feature
Fighting That Feeling of Purposelessness
There's a toaster sitting forlorn
In the almost dry bed of the brook,
Dials thrusting hopefully upstream,
Chrome glistening in the winter air.
I drove past it three times today.
I drove down the winding lane
Over the debris that used to be a pigeon
Tyres scribbling the story of its end
In grey feathers and blood
Past the toaster glumly waiting
For the rain to come.
The sign before the road’s elbow crook
Warns of a flood that's more a persistent puddle
And of ice we haven't seen in weeks.
The toaster arrived with the last deluge, I guess,
Though presumably not from the sodden fields,
Unless our neighbour has discovered a new cash crop.
I didn't see the toaster when I passed it tonight
I’m sure it sparkled beneath my headlights
Waving a jaunty silvered greeting from the gulley
But my eyes were on the road
On tears welling in the corner of my son's eyes
As I rushed him to hospital on Christmas Eve.
From the Press:
This body of work is deeply moving and precise in delivery. It articulates a common behavior—distracting oneself because the emotional weight is too close to touch. Using a toaster as a central focal point works—it is something meant for warmth and usefulness, but stranded in the cold. Noticing it, not because it matters, but because it doesn't.
Joel captures a tired landscape, akin to the speaker's perspective. Everything promises drama and delivers inconvenience instead. Even the pigeon isn't captured as a moment of grief—just something reduced to marks on the road. Life keeps going, indifferent, and you're just passing through it.
There is lightness found in the third stanza. It reads like the kind of thought you have when you're trying desperately to stay normal, trying to joke yourself back into equilibrium. This doesn't break the poem; it shows how close to the surface things are to boiling over.
The ending lands with an emotional right hook from out of the blue—it wasn't about the toaster. The attention shifts because it has to. Purpose doesn't arrive as meaning; it arrives as urgency. There's no lesson, no resolution, just forward momentum and fear and care all at once.
Ending on a cliffhanger, Joel leaves the reader wondering an important question:
What happened to his son?
There is no need to explain the disappearance of the toaster; it's just something that drifted in during a flood and got left behind, as certain feelings do. And when something truly important happens, it vanishes from our field of vision without a second glance.
About the Author:
Joel has the hands and feet of a much taller man. He predominantly writes speculative fiction, but has had more personally obvious material published in Strawberries Journal, Epistemic Literary, and The American Journal of Nursing. He promises he can hide a theme in the subtext.
More of his work can be found through his Linktree.
