Poetry – Issue 6 | August 2009
Metamorphoses
by W.F. Lantry
“How time reverses
the proud in heart.
I now make verses
who aimed at art.”
-Cunningham
A southern freight goes by, three blocks away,
reminding me of how I once fled north
towards Kiruna, in the summer where
our sun, unhinged, remained. The Swedish air,
the minuscule trees, the elks, all seemed
unnatural. I could not sleep. I knew
the life I’d fled was waiting for me, and
my journey, worthless, ended there. Or on
an Irish ferry, something like my life
was lost: the wake behind me opened out
containing, in my memory, all I’d
experienced. It was not done with ease,
nor is examination of these tracks
a simple thing- they seem an ancient wound
sutured with ties, their pine grain weathered now.
Night dogs are barking, now the train’s gone by
the whistle’s fled across the wintered south
as if it’s signaled all it has to say.
About the author
W. F. Lantry fought fire in California, nearly caused an avalanche at Isola 2000, and woke up to reindeer outside Kiruna. He put up stiff resistance against Texas fire ants, and killed the largest rattlesnake that ever lived, with his garden spade, just west of Mobile Bay. But he never faced actual danger until he moved inside the beltway. And you thought you had it rough!
Read our current issue, Issue 6 | August 2009:
Poetry
Berlin by Sy Margaret Baldwin
Two Poems by Sean Edgley
After Your Funeral I Set Out to Find You in Different Time Zones by Jennifer Faylor
Painter by Ricky Garni
Other Than by Dana Guthrie Martin
Two poems by Timothy Kercher
Five Views of Guanajuato: A Mythology by Athena Kildegaard
Two poems by Mary Kovaleski Byrnes
Goya by Trent Nutting
The Changing of the Flowers by Jennifer Saunders
Two poems by Ken Turner
Postcard prose
Buttons by Jennifer Faylor
The Enemy Tree by Kirby Wright
Escape on the Canal by Addie Zierman
