Divorced from their meanings, some words have lovely sound. Poo, with its soft plosive puh, the same oo as in moon, a word poets are fond of. Chlamydia could be a beautiful vine with violet petals unfurling around the kitchen bay window. Balaclava might refer to the delicate, pale collar bones [...]
_________________________________________________ Dayna Patterson is Poetry Editor at Psaltery & Lyre. For more, and information about where else to find her work, go here. Photo by JRLibby, 2012 via Wikimedia Commons.
As I walk on a warm evening, an invisible strand of spider silk lands across my neck. Another snags my elbow. I brush at them, but they are tricky to unhook. Where is the spider who set this clever snare? I’m not near a tree or pole or any structure for that matter. This spider [...]
Innocence splintered when I watched the tree branch fall. Sleeping in tight corners, the wind, the rain, the mourning trees all spoke my name as they cried out. But in those sounds—the creaking, the whining and pounding, the whistling of the wind between leaves and branches— There was clarity, the possibility of death so that [...]
In the city, glass-skinned buildings like bitmapped mountains pulse with interior stars. Streets flow with headlights like lambent corpuscles navigating a maze of webbed capillaries. My neighborhood crawls with progeny enough to fascinate any ant farm gazer. My house clings to earth like mudded swallow’s nest, bright as bowerbird canopy strewn with colored nothings. My [...]
The boy on his way to school Saw the earth eating a dog. Black and brown, warm and sleek, A lolling grin so like its kind: It was killed by a car and Fell among the roadside weeds Without notice and was still. How long did the earth dance on Before the boy saw its [...]
________________________________ Bradley McIlwain is a Canadian-based writer and poet who lives and works in rural Ontario. His poems have been published in national and international print and online magazines. He holds a Bachelor of Arts, Honours, from Trent University, with a major in English Literature. His first book of poems, Fracture, is now available. Photo, “Lightning, [...]
Space exhaled a puff of air. Caught in its stream pathless terrene thought it well to cleave a fresh path form a new road unzip the miles-thin protective layer. Aeriform meteoric hand punched through. Glass jugs exploded in a cosmic grand plie windows shattered crystalline light show creation’s crumble celestial chaff in its random wind. [...]
Through tangles of blackberry canes gallops a regal creature of the timber: Odocoileus virginianus, or the white-tailed deer. This one is a buck with cracked antlers, his coat birch brown. He sniffs the air before crossing the man-made paths. This veteran has survived so many hunting seasons because of his respect for orange vests and [...]
I read through my old diary tonight. Inside a sweater drawer is where I found it—tattered travel log. It had a slight tear on the spine, but still was neatly bound. I read my thoughts on some far distant night, stone turrets wrapped in ivy, summer-crowned green willow trees with soft Parisian light across the [...]