Poetry

Ceslovas Cesnakevicius

By

Stephen Mead

Trout Thursday

Rain, a throat closing over.

Jonquils in this kitchen

fan out against the pool.

It’s feast or famine, nature’s

gate. One side of the globe,

the house, draws on soaked shrouds.

Here we light cigarettes to read

each other by the red glow.

Smoke spills across amber.

The petals, as if trout,

let scents swim, school,

a mild field of force…

Thursday the newspaper wraps

them up in a wastebasket,

names, charcoal features,

smudging gold.

I write about it as if slicing an onion.

On mundane paper, I’m an adventurer.

Overhead, gurgling rain, mouths move

across the world.

Zoos Of The Apocalypse

Skateboarding across all the ran sackers left;

giraffe necks, whale tails, some peacock’s plume;

a jackal appears, somersaults then coasts,

flippant, into an old toppled rain tower.

Together we start a rink, a couple of museum

pieces selling extinction like a pelt.

Business has been rather slow this year.

Except for a few regulars, the chicken-legged

ocelot and okra-bellied anteater

now subsisting on canned spam, there isn’t

too much interest in such curiosity shop trends.

We make ends meet by splicing them. Pray

the grafts hold, put up a sign; Gone Fishing.

The joke’s pretty stale, this carrion on its spit;

what’s rotten in Denmark is the stench of

the whole globe.

Are we cherishing flesh then or milking sanctity

like a resource whose use lies in fire, the dead

man’s bluff when the sun’s yolk has been devilled

and the moon is a cyst since leprosy pocked everyone

into some kind of hybrid?

Never mind, never mind.

Now that we’re the same race

it’s hard to tell just who is the fittest.

Stephen Mead

A resident of NY, Stephen Mead is a published artist, writer, maker of short-collage films and sound-collage downloads. His latest P.O.D. amazon release is an art-text hybrid, “According to the Order of Nature (We too are Cosmos Made)”, a work which takes to task the words which have been used against LGBT folks from time immemorial.  In 2014 he began a webpage to gather links of his poetry being published in such zines as Great Works, Unlikely Stories, Quill & Parchment, etc., in one place:  Poetry on the Line, Stephen Mead