SLEEP-DEPRIVED
a boy walks along carrying the spark to the next war in hand
He is at a grinding stalemate in his home.
It seems a forever war: rockets & artillery on two metres from the conflict line.
A deadlocked, time-warped conflict no end in sight.
He is young enough, the boy, to still wear dreadlocks.
He feels himself to be a wronged region.
Dispirited, but no one can talk him out of it
Now he is stalemated: not fully annexed from his grief, fear, O loss: the gloss:
his mother’s battle with cancer.
He returns from school, each afternoon, baseball cap turned around the visor shield him: the tears are salt, sting his face, as he bends to kiss her.
ABOUT LIGHT
flicker moths
It’s music that carries the heart & soul. I write of lifelong struggle with polio:
About the railroad in my backyard, a target for war planes
About the birds’ nest spiderwebs in our bedroom ceiling about the library.
Horrors of a wartime childhood
Were shaded over my life in a childhood ward. I’ve got lift life, a bowl. Drink it.
Discover the slightly undiscovered, you are pale as pain
Even about the books themselves
Pages turning. The top ten. I wouldn’t rash & burn. Delicate landscapes were in my heart., a magnifying glass to loss.
I have a work-live space in my heart, mutons, flooded with light:
There I just might, take in hand pencil, pen: this existence with strife so wrought it might be inlaid with gold: there I might write. About light.
Lynn Strongin’s homeland is America. Her adopted country, Canada. She has twelve books out, work in over forty anthologies, and has been nominated for a Lambda Award, two Pushcart Prizes, and the Pulitzer Prize in literature. Lynn’s chapbook from Right Hand Pointing, Slow Dark Film, is available.
The Pine Cone Review 