The Gorko Gazette

Daily Humor

thegorkogazette

5.17.2026 6:59 AM

THE CLASS & HAPPY HOUR by J.R. Solonche

THE CLASS

I once went to a Tai Chi class.
The teacher told me to watch all
the others and just do what they do.
I tried, but whatever it was I was doing,
it certainly was nothing like what they
were doing. At the end, they all clapped.
I was shocked, so I asked them why
since I was terrible. “It doesn’t matter.
It was your first time. You didn’t give
up. You kept going and finished,” is
what they said. I’ve never gone back,
but I look at people a little differently
now. For instance, I watched a man
in the hardware store looking at paint
cans while gently swaying back and
forth, shifting his weight from the ball
of his left foot to the ball of his right
foot and back again. It was effortless,
it was rhythmic and very graceful.
It was perfect Zuo Gu, You Pan
and Zhong Ding. I wanted to clap.

HAPPY HOUR

The clock strikes a bargain
with the light, shaves a sliver
off the afternoon to pay for
a glass of something amber.
Now is the hour of the great
softening when the sharp edges
of the workday begin to blur.
The room is a choir of low
voices, a steady hum of small
confessions rising above
the clink of the ice. There’s
a temporary grace in the salt,
in the way the lime sits on
the rim, a small, green moon.
We’re all investors in this brief
market who trade deadlines
for a sixty-minute truce. By
the time the sun touches
the glass, the heavy lifting
of being ourselves has been
set down on the floor, and
for a moment, the tab is
settled, the shadows are long
and kind, and the next hour
is someone else’s problem.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Nominated for the National Book Award, the Eric Hoffer Book Award, and nominated three times for the Pulitzer Prize, J.R. Solonche is the author of 40 books of poetry and coauthor of another. He lives in the Hudson Valley.