Featured Poem

 

Ischemic

 

There is snowfall in her voice

sifting into gullies on the mountain   

resting on sagging wires that 

carry their lost wishes.

 

Minus-two at sixteen-hundred hours   

the street untrodden   the road 

laddered with tyre marks   the fields 

merging   fogged by snow.

 

The past a blizzard   the future’s 

present moments measured in 

fractals   in formulas of endless 

mathematical permutation. 

 

They flake from sky onto sheets 

where his brother lies stroke-

stunned in the ward. He glances 

to the garden remembering 

 

fieldfare this morning   flocking 

to the lawn below this window   

scuffing the snow for rowan berries   

with hunger's enduring rage.

 

Now his face   caught in the dark 

glazing   her voice lowered towards 

sign-off   tearful   choked by that 

infarction’s river silt.

 

Now moon’s aura above the free-

hand horizon    its sac swollen with 

rechargeable light   cast onto ridges

into larches where years back   

 

he found the tonnage of a flat stone 

balanced on some hidden fulcrum   

saw an owl leave a branch   its white 

apparition winging it home.

​

Published in Aftershock 3