Send up to three poems on the subject of or at least mentioning the words hell and/or heaven, totaling up to 150 lines in length including stanza breaks, in the body of an email message or attached in a Word file to donkingfishercampbell@gmail.com by 11:59 PM PDT on September 22nd. No PDF's please. Color and B&W artwork are also desired. Please send in JPG form. No late submissions accepted. Poets and artists published in Four Feathers Press Online Edition: Hell or Heaven will be published online and invited to read at the Saturday Afternoon Poetry Zoom meeting on Saturday, September 23rd between 3 and 5 pm PST.

Thursday, September 21, 2023

Maria A. Arana

Who wants to grapple with death? 


there is no cure for the ailments of the world

reflect on the way things were before your mind conceived tragedy

you bore no ill will nor deserted hope

and in times of strife, you struck with a wicked tongue

it should have been a knife, so the blood could sign the end on the floor

 

 

 

by the river bank


a sense of the end fills your body

consuming the life once had

gaping you sip from the water

as your ancestors did before you

damn the sickness that ensues

and damn the calamity of offering

thirst one last request

and when night blankets the earth

the stillness comes alive

 

 


toxic

 

i can’t look into your eyes

they hold the world in chains

bound and swept across the void

or is it the black hole

they call a heart?

it gathers lost souls

and dispense of the rest

like a lost button that’s never found


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