• Christopher Konrad

 

1 Stolen brush strokes, images and assorted catastrophes.

2 She leans hard, he not exactly all sweetness, on this humid summer’s evening.

3 Rain falls like terror in the eyes of a hardened criminal. Mother has not totally abandoned him.

4 The dog, tail wagging, tongue slobbering. His master returns: tears come to the mutt’s eyes.

5 Visions of tables and apples: mother, scolding, will not return my memories.

6 I loved once. I cried. I lived in fear and fear and fear: forest after forest of felled trees

6.5 Slaughtered valleys full of mud landslides in voluptuous, deadly curls down river ways.

7 A view of the horizon—still, silent like Monet, Morisot, Mary Cassatt, Degas, Pissarro.

8 Stillness on a cold morning exhaled from open lips, like breath inviting refulgence.

9 In the future the Martians are on their way. The odds are a million to one, yet still they come.