The Beam Of Blue Light

 

Will devour

The yellow glow

 

To create

A zone of

Green light

 

Imitating

The stars

Which always

Say  Here I am

 

Until they bounce

Off the Earth  

With quark-size

Images

Of you and your shadow

 

You did not know it

But there you are

In the universe

Riding some beams

Of light from Earth

Next to a moth & some rust

 

By John McKernan

 

  

Things Live Inside My House

 

Besides

Me

 

And move at night

With the silence

Of a spider web

 

I want to hear

The mouse trap snap

And not listen to the color yellow

In a thimble full of cheese

 

The fish in the tank

Are swimming too quietly

I want them to wake me up

Crunching the skull

Of a drowned fly or a cockroach

 

By John McKernan

 

 

Under The Stone Moon

 

Shadows

Multiply In West Virginia

 

On the dark side

Of this black walnut

Leafless in March’s iced lilac midnight

 

Miles beneath  my feet

Sleek new Japanese  half -track  Cats

Chew a new seam of old forest

High-sulfur New jersey  power-grid light

 

The fossilized eyes

Of extinct birds & flying fish

Embedded in chunks of coal

Roll their  stone retinas

Into the floodlights of Wolf Pen tipple

 

By John McKernan

 

 

John McKernan – who grew up in Omaha Nebraska in the middle of the USA– is now a retired comma herder after teaching 41 years at Marshall University. He lives – mostly – in West Virginia where he edits ABZ Press.  His most recent book is a selected poems Resurrection of the Dust.  He has published poems in The Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review, The New Yorker, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Journal, Antioch Review, Guernica, Field and many other magazines.

 

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