Acceptance: WHL Review

Irene Koronas at WHL Review took three of my poems for the upcoming issue of this Cambridge journal. These are: "Post Feast," "Burn Victim," and "Last Impressions of Some Clerk."

Without the support of Ms. Koronas and WHL over the years, I might well have given up poetry. The rejection weighs on the soul. Right now, I am heavily focused on my novel, which I'd like to finish before I die, with much less time for poetry submissions. There are a few special editors who know my work well, and I have had to rely on them more and more.

Below is a poem of mine from a 2007 issue of WHL.

Fly Well In the Dark

Owl


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Danger Zone

a bout of silence
bubbles in his head,
slaying heartburn and beaches,
stock options, bed bugs and football;
strangling even the faux-pas fearlessness
of his lust.

for a terrible brief quiet,
enough to show
he is urgently and
permanently scarred,
he can jump through
a manhole of jagged truth,
tunnel to expose warrens
of self-betrayal--

or he can close this vision
of mean hope, drown its purpose
in a detergent of shallow stress.

with automatic anger
and a fuisillade of excuses,
he puts on his best
quarterback-Batman face,
until at last, slow as the pummeled
rictus of the moon,
the ghosts of innocence past
go down.


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