Freak April blizzard–
lawn-care sign forlorn on a
plain of icy white.
Author: Michael J. Barney
Michael J. Barney works for a multi-national insurance megalith (not, alas, the same one as Wallace Stevens) where he toils day and night to facilitate the transfer of wealth from one pocket to another within the same pair of pants. In his spare time he scribbles poems, dotes on his wife, speculates on why Leonard Cohen and Jacques Brel are not as popular in America as Ricky Martin or Britney Spears and runs Gravity Presses (lest we all float away) Inc., a small press publisher of poetry chapbooks and a quarterly magazine, Now Here Nowhere. He can be contacted at mikeb50 at hotmail.com.
Mosquitoes, leave me!
I have no more blood to take-
you’ve drained it all!
White moon, onyx sky
No clouds hiding the fierce stars.
Tranquil summer night.
Little brown sparrow
singing goodbye to the sun
in the soft twilight
A boy swims alone
In sea reaching to the sun.
Look! His head! Gleaming!
In the looming dusk
a heron spears a bluefish-
the pond just ripples
A single cricket
sounding a single sharp cry
as the moon appears
Trees don pajamas
Of ostentatious color
Preparing to sleep.