The February Selected Poet is Mark Powers

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

THE WATER PASSAGE

Take my facile pen to the grave—
Know that the alpine coffin lid is secure …
To deny a singular, reanimated soul a chance,
To reinvent a fresh, insufficient line in
The stormy queue along the minions,
Of each effervescent, militant day—
The so unheeded afterglow,
Of the dying poet’s last, lusty, tactile wish,
As his heart laments for the
Greater Good—
Beginning among the winning hands,
Among the hailing, earthward …
Of the soporific, quizzical quilt,
From the cannons of the stoic—
Revolutionary stars.

EVE FOUR
Dedicated to Sephera Giron

The strange hour of darkness is by four,
The swiftly erupted eminence
Of the prominent distal night—
It’s a quotation …
After the quickening intimacy of the cursing fading dusk,
A statement not fully spoken,
Reciprocating a bleak-black, so cold, so odd;
But the calcifications to this tomb-like speech,
Rail to this hiatus of eloquent, day-lit mien,
Over the charm, lights out at this brisk rim—
Ride the nighthawks, this pleasure theirs,
Like purgatory,
They understanding the elegiac, exploding shade
Written in terror of the disappearing light,
This whip of cascading, extinguishing light,
The elegantly undercutting of the scintillation
Of prior morning light—
Dark-tongued, down, exhuming this last of afternoon,
Wearing scales of fashion, the glow down harrowing inside and away
From the last big shards of this princely, Daily-World-Day.

BEACH MUSINGS

Lying skyward
Upon the earth’s dim
Vestal shores—
I inspected a quaint,
bursting wayward, milliseconds
of nocturnal time
filleted between my
sweeping, pantomimed, sacral fingers
as Lucifer’s hide
stretched sinking,
as shriveled
rolling hunger—
bright, unaccountably roseate,
and intertwined—
flushed down,
from the freckled empyrean—
daylight kingdom’s
weeping, soporific,
turbid, sweetly russet
land of gnashing psalms—
down,
into the sizeable pale
now innocuously searing
galvanized sea.

Mark Powers, age 66, has been formerly trained in the arts and crafts 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 The Last Cold War Cowboy), so inspired him to want to become a writer that he signed up as an English major the following fall quarter at this university, and received his B.A. in English there.

He has worked in various clerical and labor jobs, and as a reporter for a local newspaper, where he interviewed master crime writer, Eugene Izzi, who so strongly liked this feature story that he pushed Mark to finish a short story. Mark then submitted it to the horror author Mort Castle to critique, who offered to mentor him. Mark thrived under Mort’s tutelage, publishing poetry in a journal such as Oyez Review, and in anthologies such as the Dan River Anthology and the First Northwoods Anthology.

In addition, Mark has had poetry published in the comic books Vampire Girls and Dream Angel. He’s also had poetry published in the illustrated Death Asylum. He has had fiction published in the anthology, Masques V, where he cosigned with authors, Ray Bradbury, Richard Matheson, William F. Nolan, Poppy Z. Brite, etc.; cover art by fellow cosigner, Clive Barker; and in the anthology, All American Horror of the 21st Century: The First Decade 2000-2010, where he coauthored with authors such as David Morrell, F. Paul Wilson, Mort Castle and Dan Chaon.