R L SWIHART
R L Swihart currently resides with his wife and two girls in Long Beach, CA.
His works have appeared in various e-zines and print magazines. New work
is slated to appear in the Summer 2006 Issue of the Avatar Review.
The Green Table
A friend axes an heirloom chair, slides splinters of wood
between glass, and dubs the collection Relics.
A neighbor dies but her name lives on.
Lying in bed, when everything's subsumed in black,
he's unable to retrieve the color blue.
The dream narrative reads house uncolored and table green
but he's able to add the copulas.
Above is like below, and at the horizon they are one.
Woodhenge
Boys amid timothy. All morning shovels bite
the turf to form the rough circle of a ditch.
Instead of greywethers, wood scraps are hauled
to the fence between yard and field.
A dead crow, five fake arrowheads and a jackknife
find new life in a shallow grave.
The departing sun slants through
a makeshift door.
Abracadabra
Instead of snow, a field of rape and an old scarecrow.
Van Gogh holds a severed ear: red on yellow.
Deer bloom in dusk.
The man with the migraine detrains at the Zoo.
Before the light fails it falls on the Hollow Tooth.
Hemmeter's Christ: gold on blue.
The Wall splinters onto postcards, into shops.
The Sandman goes West, and the little man in the hat
turns green.
Drinking to the Mirror
Dung the rose and it won't grow teeth
On the balcony the beetle's on its back
when the lizard comes to prey
Lounging in the mouth of a deck-chair
Frank follows her prose but not to her
He swallows the last gulp and tumbles
into the hull of a small boat
It only gets smaller
Back to Front.