Updates for January

Submissions

I’m almost caught up on reading submissions and working on the upcoming Spring/Summer 2019 issue. Submissions will be closing the end of February so there is still time to get your submissions in. Current needs are art and photography. All submissions are being considered for the Spring/Summer 2020 issue. The Fall/Winter 2019 issue is full but there is room for art and photography. See website for guidelines and current issue info. www.thestraybranch.org

My review for Crafting Wings by Joseph Murphy

Coming Soon…

Seasons and Shadows

About Seasons and Shadows

Depression, grief and sadness mixed with a touch of sarcasm and dark humor, “Seasons and Shadows” is a collection of poems about the darkness, the shadows and the sorrows brought on by the season of late fall into the long winter that seems never ending until that first glimpse, a tiny hint of spring to set free the ghosts as a new sense of hope is wafted through the soft breeze. Until then there is only the harsh cold of the dying and the endless deaths as you feel more and more out of touch, lost in that deep fog buried deeper and deeper in the depths of that darkened tomb of despair.

Excerpts

Winter

Is like crawling into the cold, dark cocoon
of a ghost infested womb waiting either to be
reborn or buried deeper……

Darkness and the Muse

My mind drifts
thoughts become cliffs
darkness like words
chasing the wind
and I’m falling
like flying
from the chalky outline
of a false sky
into the silence of
my shadow on the
pavement below
no less tainted by
the void of an almost hope
that I could inspire to rise
wiping the blood and the dream
from my eyes

Birthing the Dark

I am hemorrhaging
the shadows of a sepia
stained season
as it changes from blood
red to a pale shade of death
in these rotting clots
of soggy, ghostly
decay

and I am left holding
the days like counting corpses
endlessly nursing these
ever hungered sorrows of pain

Ghosts

This frozen flesh
these dusty white flakes
of the cold ghosts I hold
trying to warm them
in the palm of
my hands as they slip
melting into the
puddles at my feet
looking down as
I let them go, free
yet those that live within
are more resistant
to the thaw
lingering in the
shadowy stain
of my reflection looking
back through the
iced over cracks

“To live poetically is to live lonely and die silently”