Answers

I prayed for inspiration

You sent a gold finch

I prayed for amazement

You sent a lightning storm

I prayed for peace

You sent a river

I prayed for redemption

You sent a shovel and a fistful of earth

Published in Eunoia Review

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The Artist

I saw the angel in the wood

But my hand slipped

Not once, but twice

And slashed a grin on that hallowed face

Glaring

In that fiendish light

He saw right through me

And my cathedrals

Through clenched teeth

He spat venom

Sweetness dissolved my tongue

How foolish was I

To think these trembling hands

Could save mankind

Published in Paradise Review on November 22, 2012

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Aftershock

Bone-cold water
scrapes away flakes of skin

beneath his fingernails

and expunges crimson

from his palms.

He swears it was a shuffle of the cards,

a roll of the dice,

a change in the weather--

anything but him.



Published in The 5-2: Crime Poetry Weekly on October 30, 3012

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Coliseum

Blood makes poor mortar

For man’s coliseum;

What a bleak existence

Bony, stretched thin

As the waxing moon.

How cheap is the infrastructure

Of more bricks, less straw.

Blink once, and

It is wiped off the face

Of the earth.

Published in Big River Poetry Review on August 25, 2012

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Aboard the Brookes, 1789

Tonight she dreams of her village

Woven in her thoughts as reeds in a basket

Her brown hands clinging to her child

Suckling, its black eyes shimmering

Its mind transported to a space where grass

Grows golden

And air

Fizzles at the touch of fingertips

Grass bends beneath her feet

Ravens soar low

Seduced by the strings of a kora

She wanders to the clearing

Where trees hang low in slumber

Where time whispers of a wilderness

No number branded

To that lion

Roaring in the hot wind

Only, the stench of dead meat

She shudders

As a young gazelle lays docile,

Striped eyes watching vultures

Descend

At dawn, she saves the bones.

Published in Emerge Literary Journal on October 2, 2012

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1933

The man stands by the apple barrel,

His hands red to the bone

Air rushing from his lips in cold, crisp bursts

He takes a green apple, throws it in the air

Catches it

He scats what jazz tunes he knows

His brassy voice ringing out

As the wing tips scuffle past

Shoulders hunched, he takes off his beret

Watches a dark suit drop a nickel, then scurry away

They all have places to go, people to see;

Not the man by the apple barrel

He has all day at his leisure

Before he must show his face at home

And tell them how he begged like a dog. 




Published in The Copperfield Review on July 30, 2012

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