FreeWrights Peer Review™

Please post your own submission or nomination of another poet's work for the April contest as a reply to this thread. Closes at 8 pm March 28. Thanks.

skinny lad with a strong backbone


Songs play around him trying to get inside
but he's this engine who runs one step ahead of score,
too quick even for automatic writing that often
moves lyric out of its enslaved rhetoric of meter

he tries to erase the beat,
move it subtly to an undertone
still heard, more less in effigy.

he can almost reach what feels like favor
and cries

agradecidos con la suerte

there's always a page left trailing,
ellipses that look like his
ponytail. He'll get it someday,

music that says its okay to kneel,
and bend. And when you hear it,
your blood doesn't feel warm
or cold, or part of you anymore,
it shimmers, and you know it's been
that chorus inside you all along.

Rabbit: A Hole in the World

I am dozing on the early Marc Train to D.C.;
we pull into New Carrollton station, three buses
side by side with yellow illuminated destinations,

I'm shuffling on my lap two works of poetry:
Unexpected Light by C.E. Chaffin: Doctor
Chaffin from Ventura, California (for review), I use

C.E. to bookmark the New Yorker with Updike's last
poems, poignant as he ponders what's left of him
as the docs take biopsies; I recall my father dying;

the light on Updike's face, wrinkles round his eyes,
Rabbit's look of wry amusement, the paper-thin skin
of his wrist, the rampant aged hairs of his eyebrows.

We hurtle to D.C. as do the automobile drivers jamming
Route 50 paralleling the train. A few more "I's" and "I am's"
to make their mark on the world or to leave a gaping hole.

Christopher T. George

The Day the Caterpillars Came


We lazed on the west bank
of the Auglaize, till days met,
fished, buzzed on warm Blatz
stolen from Treat’s garage
and puked foam after inhaling
roll-your-own cigarettes.

We believed Tecumseh, the boy,
had climbed the oaks across the river
and Tecumseh, the man, had commanded
the canopies to silence screams
from settlers slaughtered by his hand.

But the Cats came, ‘dozed down the old trees.
Diesel fumes suffocated the excitement
stoked by the “miracle stone”
with its twenty-seven skips, skims and skitters
over water’s glycerin surface.

Centuries,
sucked up through roots now exposed
to a death dance of sun and air,
awaited rites at a lumber mill.
Columnar trunks that once supported
clouds and stars would relive
as flimsy veneer and spindly table legs.

With nothing to prop it up,
the plum-colored universe met the ground
and morning blues would drop onto the east bank.
We didn’t know whether to invoke the name
of Jesus or a Shawnee sachem,
cry out loud to the world,
“Look at the sky!
It is falling.”

Good luck Kay and Chris. Oh, and good luck to me. Sooner or later we will bring home a first place winner. Thanks for your support and entries.