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
after Pablo Neruda I love you the way I love Fritos, grape jam, and bling— the way a bonfire spits sparks into a sky scorched with stars. I love you as much as a full tank of gas—through switchbacks,and wisecracks—window rolled down so everyone can see. I love you secretly, between my plush and my pit—the way my mother loved her Persian Melon lipstickin the 60s—the way it … Continue reading Love Sonnet: XVII Revised by Dale Champlin
the day is getting closerclimbing like a high notesoft as a whisperbetrayal Lord now it (the note I mean)swings back and forth on a current of airand you’re just a slip of a thingit’s all I can do to lie still beneath thebedcoversthe pale breath of youcatching in my throatI trynot to thinkor not to think too much or I might die of something or otheror spend … Continue reading Oh the feel of it by Dale Champlin
after “Love Letter” by Diane Seuss Dear X, I’ve learned you so well, like a dog-eared book read once too often. Repeated lines keep coming back to haunt me. But what can love be if it is a past tense event? I think the expression might be love’s lost or something of that nature. To my way of thinking, the affection you were after was … Continue reading Dear X by Dale Champlin
Among the many glowing reviews that Taylor Swift’s eleventh album, The Tortured Poets Department, has received, a line from one in particular sought to further position the work as genuine poetry—high-brow prose. To be more specific, The Times’ review deemed the songs on the album to be “as rich and concise as a short story collection.” Even if no truly rich and concise short story … Continue reading Faux Erudition and The Taylor Swift TTPD Bump When It Comes to an Interest in Literature
“and even you forgot those brilliant flashes seen from afar” —Ruth Stone I should have taken you up on that trip to Mexico—my only chance to swim in the gulf, to surfthe exotic and erotic; tequila, bizarro birds,burnished sunrise through slats in the shutters,instead of a turndown. My big mistake was to playthe fool—too cool for school. I should have held youin my strong arms, … Continue reading Regretfully Yours by Dale Champlin
