Peripheral Noose

Shrub roses raspberry and spiderwortpurple by the locked garden gateonce colored rainbow our irises, but since my sentence started, I find smiling buds distasteful.I don't want to spit on their blooms,but dark clouds close in like wallssuffocating my view. It’s possible I could let the sunshine in…through fence picket prison bars.Tunnel vision was fated by…

Sahara to Stardust

We stir up sand running at speed to climb clouds towards a milky galaxy we’ve labeled the ethereal Heaven. Yet what do we use to achieve our goal, but plastic supplies stored in polyester bags. Eternally, we remain ill-equipped to face the ex-wife when we keep fingers laced with her abuser. Man-made madness so consumes…

Pruned by Changing Tides

Yesterday, Nereids opened sleep-blessed eyes in subaquatic crystal caves, not knowing they’d never return. Yesterday, Nereus washed his hands of his daughters, sent them in mists and drifts over selkie rocks to play with the seal-maidens where he did not hear their incessant laughter reminding him of shared grief. Yesterday, A lunar mind hemmed in…

Sweetgum

Eldritch brambles climb the sky leaving no root-work behind to trace their trail. Only a gale hovers weaving in and around a thorn belly so the elderly doe sees but a friend, a rain cloud to bring her drink again to hydrate shoulders still housing organs fighting to live. One careful step, next, another. She…

A Taste of Your Salt

I found you cold, full of hot air that could never warm your skin, only the sky red in both our eyes for lack of pulse beneath a rhyolite veneer. Not blood but glass cut through our veins, made us rough to exfoliate others’ skin. They became better for the knowing of us. Our lessons…

Among Sparrow Guano

A marked path, pristine, sterile dirt finally buries all trash, litter, mutated monkey bones. Synthetic beauty of art and architecture: an acceptable loss to bandage over ever-bleeding deep human scars of utility, efficacy, and convenience that forever plagued the autotrophs. The last artist loses himself in fog, enfolding his essence between ancestral trees. He finds…

Lovers’ Leaves

Lipstick stains on deciduous bark endure, undetectable under the blush of umber notes hung on stiff arms ready to be torn by the wind, drifted down a creek like a microcosm of the oceanic message in a bottle. Love-letters are effaced by silt and diluted fish filth if not found at the precise moment characters…

Let Me Tell You a Secret

This basalt-paved walkway juts out into deep water, concluding suddenly at an arbitrary edge…but the path continues subaquatic. No surveyor has ever discovered they walk on rooftops of tower columns: skyscraper rivals with how deep they go. Aboveground cousins own whispers of giants and their causeways, yet divers do not explore what lies beneath. Not…

Always Winter?

Tiptoes of snow encroach on tranquil streams that feed the sea. The same drops that touch the Emperor's toes ripple back to the Witch's heels. Her hands turn pretty patterns around her wand. Spirals and helixes create icicle skins to form after an icicle heart, her cells slowed down by lack of invigoration. She, oh,…

The Last Voyage

Now a polar bear’s snout emerges from a woman’s eye. An ear by her brow hears Heaven’s curse as torrents below taunt a chin made of smoke. A lighthouse once secured the shore, but night had reclaimed its stolen star and dawn drew in a slithering storm. Cataracts on eyes watched cataracts of waves bluster…