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J.B. Toner

The April Editor's Pick Poet is J.B. Toner

Please feel free to email J.B. at: jbtoner.z@gmail.com

jb

FALL (A Broken Sonnet)

leaves of fire
cold rain
gusts like groans of pain
mire

everything freezes
everything fades
love has withered, hope has greyed
heaven is a maelstrom of diseases

we remember and we cherish
we have danced and we’ve enjoyed—
evil things and lovely things now perish
flesh and spirit slide into the horrifying void
one last swirl of dead leaves, red and garish,
and then

VERNAL DAMNATION (A Broken Sonnet)

It’s March and April when the coffins crack
The tomb-gates creak and quiet corpses wake
Life’s only comfort, Death, contorts and breaks
Slime-weeds and moss come slinking, crawling back 

The bitter promise of the bygone Fall—
Eternal rest, escape from putrefaction—
Shall face the lying, dying god’s redaction:
Unwanted resurrection blights us all

Exiled from ice, life rots and shits and fucks—
The trap of Spring snaps shut upon our necks—
we cannot die—we cannot die—oh equinox—

please
let us
die

NIGHTFALL IN UTQIAGVIK

The polar night has come. Two months of black.
Pale frozen stars long dead. The slopping Sea.
The Borealis, flare of lunacy.
Lean ravens pecking at dead Autumn’s back.

The earth is carrion. The sky is ice.
Seagulls like Grendel shrieking from the Pole.
The dark between the stars. The tomb of souls.
Wolves haggard as the birches, grey as Christ.

Cadaverous and gelid universe—
Decomposition—entropy—decay—
Despair and dark and death a world a hearse

. . .the dancing night upon the corpse of day
the fall of all the everlasting curse

J.B. Toner studied Literature at Thomas More College and holds a black belt in Ohana Kilohana Kenpo-Jujitsu. He has published two novels, Whisper Music and The Shoreless Sea, and many shorter works. Toner lives and works in Massachusetts with his beautiful wife and their beloved daughters.

Twitter: jbtonerz