Richard Patrick Gage
Bio
I'm an author and publisher of poem anthology group from northern Ontario, I like enabling other voices and new writers. I'm also a novel writer, known for the indie darling Noetic Gravity that came out in June 2025. Here I write for me.
Stories (13)
Filter by community
Red Under Ash
In winter, my ritual is not song. It is work. I crouch near the heat and do the same steps, slow and exact. I wake what stayed alive under ash. I feed it careful. I listen for the change in breath, the small sounds that mean the fire will hold.
By Richard Patrick Gage24 days ago in Humans
Morning Keeps the Change
Change is the rumor that turned out to be true, the one tenant that never quits the lease, and yet we keep acting like it just moved in yesterday. We ask for it at the ballot box, at the mirror, in whispered prayers, then flinch when it starts rearranging the furniture of our days. This is me trying to get honest about how we live as both magnet and shield toward it, how we court it, resist it, and slowly turn into it in all the shapes it takes.
By Richard Patrick Gage28 days ago in Poets
Lost Pages
Sometimes I tear a page out so fast it rips twice. The trash bin beside the desk is full of half-confessions and almost-truths, curled in on themselves like dried leaves. I tell myself they’re gone, but my chest remembers every line I didn’t let live.
By Richard Patrick Gageabout a month ago in Poets
False Winter. Content Warning.
deep-winter silence covers the real storm in me and I blame the snow All winter I let the season answer for me. Too dark, too far, roads a mess, easier than saying I couldn’t get myself off the couch. Friends believed the snowstorms; I almost did, too. Now the banks are shrinking and the excuses with them. I’m still slow, still carrying that heavy, invisible coat, but when I drag one bag of garbage to the curb and come back in, there’s melt on the mat and a thin strip of light under the door that wasn’t there before.
By Richard Patrick Gageabout a month ago in Poets
The Oldest Posture of the Land
The shift begins in the air’s density: a faint thinning at the edges of warmth, the atmosphere recalibrating its balance of heat and loss. Light fractures differently across stone, and shadows migrate along new vectors. The world reorders itself by degrees, quiet and measurable and precise.
By Richard Patrick Gageabout a month ago in Poets
Nothing Biting
The road ends in gravel and frost-heaved roots. I kill the engine; metal ticks as it cools and the bush presses in, a raven heckling from the treeline. The lake lies dull as metal between black spruce, the dock slick with algae. I carry rod, tackle box, thermos. No one’s here to impress. I bait the hook by feel, fingers already numb, and cast until the line lands softer than a thought.
By Richard Patrick Gageabout a month ago in Poets
