Chris McCreary

Anon

Between trees, the enemy’s

in the empty, the shed skins akin

to unseemly sheaves

slipped under eaves

for neat retrieval. Terza rima, terra

firma, rough semblance of form’s

solidity. Us & the blood moon

enough to unglue the roof & dip walls

& stars in hot tar. We are all animists

once the moss stops talking. Gravel path’s

overgrown, pedestals & ledgers illegible

in umbral obscurity. All’s gone

in the copse, an abyssal vault

uprooted & subsumed.

Grub

Reassurance turns,

wormed,

furtive

for sugared hooks.

Barbs are

baked in. Caked in muck.

Brains snake for either auricle

if you’re ornery

enough.

Worst Sonnet

“No worst, there is none.”

– Gerard Manley Hopkins

Terrible sonnet. Horrible, really.

No good, very bad sonnet day drunk on

a Monday. Abominable sonnet

of nostrums & snot rockets snorting your

sympathetic powders in this roadside

porta-potty. Sonnet love bombed then dropped

like a radioactive potato.

Broken sonnet gross & exhorting. Lex-

ically bedeviled by hellebore &

henbane, exalting in its vitriol.

Sonnet of collage & frottage, blue boot-

leg printer ink stored in antique spirit

bottles & poured out as body shots. Naugh-

ty, naughty sonnet. Bad manners. Poor form.

Chris McCreary says: My latest book, awry, will be published by the end of the year by White Stag. Other recent poems appear at Ballast and Noir Sauna. I live in S. Philadelphia.