KG Newman is the editor of a high school sports website, ColoradoSportsNetwork.com, and lives in Aurora, Colo. He is an Arizona
State University graduate and his first collection of poems, While Dreaming of Diamonds in Wintertime, is available on Amazon.
~KG Newman
Postmortem Imagination
You’re in South
Bend and I wander the peak
in Colorado Springs
like I’m a spy on the job,
waiting for the
copter’s rope to drop
and whisk me a
centennial of betrayals back
to where you
are. This water bottle could be
a flare today.
Multicolored lichen seem to mark
the rendezvous
spot. A couple taking
a summit selfie:
Have they got any chance
in hell? I think
of what words I would radio last
should the
copter be blasted by a long range
ballistic
missile. I think of our jackets,
on their
hangers, in the dusty hall closet;
How close they
hold each other, and never let go.
Empty Beds
Danielle, somewhere in
Indiana
Mellencamp’s little pink
houses
listen to you sob.
Thorns in curbside
piles of leaves. What was
once red and yellow now
soggy and brown. Through
chimneys your stress exhales,
warm foggy breath
in a field in a fall
Midwest shiver.
Granaries are our
Senate buildings.
Stalks sway in a barely
noticeable way.
The wife of the happiest
merchant at the market
has died and so who
will guide us?
It’s natural to want
to bury something
that hasn’t yet passed.
Helium in the wrinkly
balloons at the pumpkin
patch. Empty baskets
by the table of gourds.
Idling trucks with
their tailgates dropped,
their tailgates dropped,
waiting for crops
to fill them up
as they always do.
Harvest Cycle
It seemed
everything had come our way.
Sex and
home-brewed coffee every morning.
Wide windows and
a breeze in each room.
Kiss-walking
through August cornfields.
Near harvest,
however, the sunlight dwindled
and we found
ourselves among the crops
in the
apocalypse, supercells circling
above our heads,
the stalks strangely still,
each effort to
talk spawning another tornado tail.
This winter we sit
cater-corner on the couch.
Why always this
sense of a looming implosion?
Flat characters
of noisy annoyance
loitering on our
television buffer, but
the rest of the
scene remains lovely:
wide icicled
windows and dogs seeking cuddles.
By spring the
scales will tip:
You’ll plant a
pot, carry it naked
into our bedroom
and drop it out
the third-story
window. The explosion
and the crying
deafeningly quiet.
~KG Newman
