Category: Poems
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Essay Series for Reckon Review’s Wind and Root
Essay #1: How Should a Writer Be?: Burnt Out on the “Fuel of Darkness”
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Jordan
Twin dream driving Black Mountain, exhale of sun, sun-choked words, blind breath crisp and dumb, we are crimson or wine dreams. Music or universe – said to shatter a piano is not merely aleatoric, but rehearsed music by Braxton, or creeping exhaust. Face of the pipesmoker, or sleep-fading face glinting. Don’t reminisce, just race the…
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Manner and Means of the Conspiracy
At the corner of Halcyon and Silver, A crime scene ribbon sashes the porch, jack O’Lanterns melt on the stoop of a house where no one, anylonger answers the door, or even peers from the windows where not even ghosts come knocking. A. It was part of the conspiracy that Tara and Ed had lived…
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Reminiscing at the Highway Garage
I wasn’t always political. Hand me that ratchet, never voted, but gone days don’t come back. Engine’s burning oil. Each year I think about the year before. Plans change, the world changes, these bolts are rusted and I’m gonna have to change with it. Each day’s a bit of luck. Look at my hands, hardly…
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Lines Written from the Sidewalk Outside La Luna Venue, Mansfield, Ohio
I. This is not the moon, anthropomorphized lazy eye drifting over my tired city: leashed creature in the hazy milk-night town turning into shadows. Statues in the park, eyes cratered as moons behind stoney clouds, depict voiceless legends. The city moves in pools of streetlights, warming from the ground up, radiating heat from its own…
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Sonnet LII
An Eye for Trouble The day begins with empty hoots from trains that pass invisible before the light trailing cars, cut-up stanzas of rhythmic, secret verse trafficked across state lines: arcane, scarcely-literate. This knowledge spreads like awe across a young boy’s face, finding right where he wants to be: buried in that bright graffiti swirl…
Nick Rees Gardner 