A few weeks later, in the wee hours, you picture the woman of your life flung on her new lover’s DreamCloud scratching his back like a cheetah. She was your high priestess, your Holy Mother. But that ended when she stormed out—after you forgot to mention how brilliant her poem was, when you found comfort spending time on the sofa, and left muddy boot prints on the white hallway runner. … Continue reading A Split from Reality by Dale Champlin
I look like an ant—red as fireor one of those grease ants you might crush with your finger as it marchesacross the kitchen counter insignificant in catastrophes of my own choosing(dear god—not yours) as sentient as all wildlife the way I head for my burrow at the first orange glow of the lowering sun imagine how … Continue reading From a distance, I know* by Dale Champlin
Are you surprised I am dead?—me too! I’m usually more than a soccer mom with a wife, a dead husband,and a six-year-old son. I left with unfinished poems,a glove compartment of stuffiesand a hole in my windshield. I tried to act casual about it—the masked men, eyes bugging out of their headspadded flak vests and crackling voices.I backed up and turned my wheel. You saw how icy the … Continue reading How are you this January evening? by Dale Champlin
When my heart beats too fast it sets off an alarm. My watch keeps count to the tick, tick, talk of my grandmother clock. Imagine a woodpecker beating a ratta-tat-tat into the bark of a tree to harvest a grub. Maybe this is too graphic—let me say—it’s as if I’m up to the yin-yang in sugar-laced marzipan. When I write, each tick of my pen records a tock of … Continue reading Everything’s Tickity-Boo by Dale Champlin
Her head presents large as a cabbagewhen I pluck her from my garden—stony ground all but bare after harvest.She looks the way I want to remember her—a salad—tulle of lettuce leaves pale as the embrace of her pea-pod green eyes.She demurs with a wilting expression.I add three cups of arugula, julienned cucumber,a handful of basil leaves, slice an avocado in halfand prise out the pit to … Continue reading Green Goddess Dressing by Dale Champlin
The cold of your breath doesn’t disturb meas I lie here all nightwhile your perfume passes through—incarnated to rock, sand and tide. I sing the song that used to fill youwith bliss, wrap you in white linenand carry you until you turn to frostset down gently between the flimsy craft’s gunnels.Now your flaming sails billow toward Valhalla.Your face has lost its deep grooves,smooth as tallow … Continue reading My Mother’s Ghost by Dale Champlin
“How frequently has melancholy and even misanthropy taken possession of me…“-Mary Wollstonecraft My life is the size of a Cheerio—brittle as oats,something missing in the center.Rooms cramped and dismal, dust mites lurk in every crevice.My life’s soul is the same as everyone else’s soulbut without the music—only a base trackhumming with the low vibrationof an electric fence. It grows moodyand remote the way dry winter aircracks … Continue reading I Hate the Whole World by Dale Champlin
dances in moonlight under a starless sky I, the figure in question, hesitate—tenuous and fragile, my small bones hardly larger than those of fishes dreaming in a blue lakemy head tipped up into wild plum night. Flocks of mourning doves rise above a mist shrouded balsam forest.What is my role in the natural world? Is this the humanity I envisioned in my youth? Will we ever be free of … Continue reading A Lone Figure by Dale Champlin
dazzling as a field of ghosts.When fog shrouds the farmland like this, I know winter can’t be far behind. In the distance, hillsides float—hazy ash to lavender, they menace.Low-lying clouds cover the pale morning a silken Victorian bridal veil. The cold penetrates,bone chilling and graved. May a bride be one of the ghosts,with her dove gray fitted bodice,leg-o-mutton sleeves—pin-tucked satin,crinoline corseted within an inch of lost breath. … Continue reading A White Mist Hovers by Dale Champlin
Sex after seventy—I was just gettingto that. But first, pull the covers up.If you could just let me say itlike it is. Hold my foot between your palms.Don’t let me interrupt the proceedings.Don’t look. Better yet,turn out the lights. This isn’t our first rodeo after all.Last time I thought I had run off with the handsomest knife throwerin the circus. Everyone knows it’s futile to try to … Continue reading Later Better Than Sooner by Dale Champlin
