The April Selected Poet is Mark Powers

Please feel free to email Mark at: markveano@gmail.com

EARTH-IN-SPIN

I dozed late into the evening swirl—
The sun a blue-nosed monkey,
Face colors sashayed into yellows and orange/blue bloom,
The colors of somber chagrin...
The glistening rivers ran polluted                               
Along the steel vectors heading west—
Rivers of dark vast, vapid pulchritude—
Heading west to the sliding of,
Every man’s integral health—
As earth’s status turns on a dime...
As rivers burn sickly wide and high—
Will things recompense
Beyond the hollow melancholy,
Of a ghostly, strung-out, planet and flaccid mumbling star?

THE DEAF

The heaviest darkness,
We can see...
Is that we can’t envision—
It hides, draws surreptitious kinks
In the breathless, dark air—
That—as in wily night bogs,
Engulfs the turbulence of the unholy,
Seeping world,
The dry undertow, severed land regions
Of the deepest grit,
Where man thinks of towers of higher narratives—
Sonic booms embellishing nightfall—
‘Booming pranks’ tethered to a timeless moon...
Scattering through a thousand-dark hallways,
‘Vacuous,’ untethered darkness—
Appraised in a mad, horn lock,
Before the creeping shafts of a rising day...

THE KISS

She puffed up, muted, soiled clouds at a sneering, hazardous moon,
Thirsting darkly, huffing the twisting black dirt path—
So deliberately moon-bone-cleaned—
Following the dangerous, ghastly, mournful, exquisite, sweet,
Subtly wafting, eidolon tainted scent,
Of his wicked, phantasmagorical pores—
For she loved him too much to let him go—
Even though she must pass this vast, serpentine, bone-silver quarry
Where the haunted, blackened, morning scorpion winds blow—

She knew she must swiftly arrive at the site of red-halos—
The place where monstrously golden, billowing-nosed, pig-bulls,
Trample all who enter without an empty, shivering-stone mourning core—

Ahead she found the empyrean rings of wanton glory—
She stood in make shift peace before the
Thousand white colossal pillars, under red-rings, of the night—
And stood in make shift peace before
The titans of the Godless, hideous night—

And made her peace with him—
Her boy who, while in a cycloned dominion of the freest,
Jagged, fiend-like, madfest—
Retired several, grim, rounds at his blackened, bloodied, once festive,
Restaurant crowd—

He was there, down inside this scoop of hell, this silver
Quarry, she knew—
Eying her upwards, as only a terrible conscience will do—

She kissed the wind-chilled air in a grafted, determined itinerant moan;
Hoping for the ravenous hour her own impassioned soul would
Deliriously alight at his home—
No reply—only the wintry zenith of hell’s black still—

She kissed again, aiming closer to his scoped core—
Dropped to the path, in blanching moans, the urging, throbbing
Muscle, rubbing rabid against the dirt-path floor—

Sitting up, she saw through bleary eyes, everlasting wings,
Darker than the hour of their plotting, sick-bellied sin,
Emptying outward like ghoulish kites—

He dropped from his transient height on the mounds of gravel—
All the while her feeling inside the virile scent,
Of his, too effortless, and empty, redolent kiss—

As he perambulated in orbit about the quarry for a while,
Then dropped swiftly inkwell deep into a blind-spot, now a blatant hole—
Down, deeper than all the severely cut quarry—
His forlorn spirit, arced, then plunged straight into hell.

Mark Powers, 66, has been formerly trained in the art and craft of literature since he was 22, when he took his first class in fiction writing at the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle Campus. The class, taught by author James Park Sloan (National Book Award nominee for his novel The Last Cold War Cowboy), so inspired him to want to become a fiction writer that he enrolled as an English major the following fall quarter at this university, and thereby received his B.A. in English there.

He’s worked at various labor jobs, and a circulation and writing position for a trade magazine at Putman Publishing Company; and as a reporter for two local newspapers. At one paper he interviewed master crime writer, Eugene Izzi, who so strongly liked this feature story, that he urged Mark to finish a short story. Mark then submitted it to the horror author Mort Castle (three-time Bram Stoker Award winner) to critique, which led Mr. Castle to become his mentor.

Mark thrived under Mort Castle’s tutelage, having poetry accepted in The Oyez Review, Space and Time, and the Riverside Quarterly. His work has also appeared in anthologies and comic books.