“After supper,/God burps through his heartburn, eyes Gabriel/and—as expected—punishes: Two thousand years/hard labor for your antics, errand boy.”
Johnny Payne’s Column
Essays & Criticism
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Category: Poetry
The Orthodox Church of Ukraine Reschedules Christmas and Judges 9:45
Hair Clip and Dread Talk
“and I send her sunflowers on a sunny day./and I think of her children./and I sing with the Wailers.”
Gods and Angels and Other Poems
“The Sistine Chapel hived billions/of microbes, moss piglets/throbbing on God’s finger, frescoes flooded/with bacteria, angels fruiting cocci.”
Étude: Perspective Photo Lyric
Beyond a life of seeing, saying, being,
by sparest nudge or shimmer, I shall cease.
I ask what for, the dying, what the living.
I start recording. I collect and keep.
Old Men Coughing
“Coughing, ululating, barking, whooping./Can he cough out the memory of a lonely/girl waiting, wanting, watching, waiting?”
Quan Yin
“Wife of himself/she taught him how to be in this world/as all women teach. The woman in you/will teach you, man king,/how to be.”
Shifting Patterns and The Rose
“Ever human-centric/We self-aggrandized/Anthropomorphized/And now agonize.”
Paying For Pleasure
“The old man had paid dearly/he could still get lost in dreams”
Homelands
“The bright green of summer wheat/with the brown of the ducks that stalk the fair/dykes where the raft spiders search for things to eat.”
Villanelle on a Theme from Rimbaud and Other Poems
“He feels himself watched/as he counts accents./He knows the painter’s/watching for the precise moment/when his blue ink freezes.”
Arteries & Veins
“In oncoming lights, my veins are dirty strings.”
After Emily Dickinson, “Circumference thou Bride of Awe”
“Every night/A lover be”
Midnight Sutra
“In yellow night, the day refuses to give ground/and I prepare to wait out its siege. Soon you’ll/arrive, and together we’ll chant the Midnight/Sutra”
Salamander
“Held in palm,/a bloom of peony to/inspect.”
You Hesitate, You Die
“A metaphysical compass, a refrain, an unyielding ethos in which to believe,/no longer reserved for near misses with the vehicular minions of the MTA,/I have come to regard existence as nothing more/than this pull between hesitation and action”
