Four Poets

We've work from four poets today – some you will have seen on this zine before, others who are new to the Grievous Angel. The four are: Pat Tompkins, Herb Kauderer, Heidi Padain, and Ken Poyner. (Authors' credits appear after their poems.) Enjoy...


dark energy
extending the universe
not unlike
bittersweet chocolate
expanding my waistline
 
* * * 

Lunar Tunes

fly me to the
paper moon dance river
great gig in the sky


* Pat Tompkins is an editor in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her short sci-fi poems have appeared in several issues of Dwarf Stars. She adds "I'm not quite a Luddite, but I don't do social media or have a blog or website."



Best Laid Plans
 
Eugene Cernan dedicated his life
to carrying mankind
into outer space
 
only to suffer
all the remaining decades he lived
being known as the LAST man

to walk on the moon.

* * *

[untitled]

on a dead world
the plastic warning label 
outlasts its container

lives on a sandy beach 
safe as could be


* Herb Kauderer is an associate professor of English at Hilbert College. He is the author of eight chapbooks of poetry, most recently The Book of Answers.



Skin and bones

The train hit hard, his physical injuries are nothing compared to the turmoil within. It was not his time, he must face his demons. Framed impressions of who he once was adorn the walls. These old photographs are vibrant, and colourful, in a black and white room where the family move around him like ghosts.The train left without him.


* Heidi Padain is the Director of Doing at Heidi Padain Photography in Waitakere, New Zealand https://www.flickr.com/photos/underst8ted/sets/



NEW PLANET LANDSCAPE 2

All day the sea throws itself forward.

Then, to please a different moon, it later
Will reel itself dutifully back.
The howl you hear,

The noise you think is water
Dancing angrily on the rock,

Are the mermen who gathered too sumptuously long
In the brief but mindfully rich shallows.

Soon, we can harvest them for leather.


* Of late Norfolk (VA)-based Ken Poyner has had poetry published in Analog, Asimov’s, Star*Line, Abyss and Apex, and several other places. His most recent collection is Constant Animals, 42 unruly fictions available in paperback and ebook via www.kpoyner.com & Amazon.