Leaping and twirling
An act of deception
Water Beneath
An Altered Reflection

Easy to fall
Slip into lies
Her smile did not quite reach her eyes

The ground beneath
Could easily break

Hid her true self
Risked her own life
To dance on thin ice

the thin line between poet and:


******* artist
is so thin,
it is almost,

almost,

invisible.

goodnight, to the pounding rain
and tear stained skin
everlasting dreams left paper-thin

See
by Michael R. Burch

See how her hair has thinned: it doesn’t seem
like hair at all, but like the airy moult
of emus who outraced the wind and left
soft plumage in their wake. See how her eyes
are gentler now; see how each wrinkle laughs,
and deepens on itself, as though mirth took
some comfort there, then burrowed deeply in,
outlasting winter. See how very thin
her features are—that time has made more spare,
so that each bone shows, elegant and rare.
For life remains undimmed in her grave eyes,
and courage in her still-delighted looks:
each face presented like a picture book’s.
Bemused, she blows us undismayed goodbyes.

Keywords/Tags: Elderly, woman, grandmother, thin, thinning, hair, airy, emu, moult, soft, plumage, wrinkles, laugh lines, frail, gaunt, bones, winter, grave, eyes, courage, laughter, family, gathered, bedside, kisses, hugs, goodbyes, farewells, life, death, photo album, pictures, photos, photographs

Published by The Eclectic Muse, Love Me Knots (an anthology of the top 100 contemporary love poems), Nutty Stories (South Africa), Black Medina, The New Formalist, Better Than Starbucks, Potcake Chapbooks, Strange Roads, Sonnetto Poesia, Litera (UK), Poems About, Poetry Life & Times, MahMag (in a Farsi translation by Dr. Mahnaz Badihian), Somewhere Along The Beaten Path (Anthology), Freshet, Life & Legends, Famous Poets & Poems, Short Quotes & Poems (listed in the top 10 short poems) and Victorian Violet Press. “See” won 3rd place in the 2003 Writer’s Digest Rhyming Poetry contest, out of over 18,000 overall entries, and was published in Writer’s Digest’s The Year’s Best Writing.

Skeleton!
Tell us what you lack ...
the ability to love,
your flesh so slack?

Will we frighten you,
grown as pale & unsound ...
when we also haunt
the unhallowed ground?

Keywords/Tags: Halloween, skeleton, pale, haunt, grave, graveyard, unhallowed, ground, thin, kin, frighten, frightening, scary, horror, terror, slack, flesh, fleshless, bone, bony, unsound, haunting

I cup a paper likeness in my hand
A flower, you say, but it's dusted
In prussian blue that stings my eyes
The colour of the end of movies, twilight
Mirrored in the smoky Thames

How can it be a flower? It doesn't breathe
I call it an onion

It spreads its biting petals out in agreement
A reminder of what it is to cry
Halfway through a song even though
I've only just finished laughing
Alcohol will do that

You name it "flower"
After your mother's smile, perhaps,
Or the gentle drift of lightning
In a summer storm, but to me
It is only a vegetable, round, familiar,
Painful with nostalgia, not saccharine
With some aesthetic pinterest sentiment

I grab a stranger's cigarette ****
Litter the paper creation with ashes, watch
The silky tissue wither
Like blind marble turning grey with age

This is what I think of your flower

How can you be happy, hang it on your wall
It's so thin, so bitter and dead
Where is the romance? Confusion rises with the fire
How can you be happy when this is fake

The warmth ****** my fingertips
I stamp it out just in time on the street
Look, the paper
It's crumpled
This is what I think of your flower
This is what I think of your happiness.