Poems

The Catacombs, France — 6 Million Screamsby Dawg Beneath the streets, Paris surrenders its living to the dust,stone tunnels braided with the relics of revolution and rust.Bones spill from alcoves, a silent architecture of regret,stacked by unseen hands, each fragment a story unmet. Murmur of centuries trapped in the humidity’s chill,femurs and skulls jigsawed together, […]

The Charnel House of Lost Memoriesby Dawg Where the dead ambitions gather, bones stacked in careful piles,and silence is a thick shroud, dust-swept and bitter,fragments of broken memory, dressed in shadow’s guile,lie beneath the rafters, neither forgiven nor fitter.Yet not all is decay in this mausoleum of defeat–within the detritus of dreams, seeds of new

The Bell Inn, Norfolk, England — The Monk’s Spiritby Dawg In the gloom-laden belly of The Bell Inn,where centuries coil and settle in the bones of the floor,moonlight rarely dares to cross the warped glass,and even lamplight flickers as though tested by the lore. Stone and timber pulse with secrets, the kind that never sleep:laughter

The Black Dress at the Burial She wore the same black dress she’d worn to threeother funerals in the past five years,a woman of a certain age knows that the threeconstants of her wardrobe are the gearsof celebration, church, and dark occasion,and she’d learned to keep the dress maintainedfor this arithmetic of loss, the equationof

The Balcony Observer I lean against the rusted rail and light a cigaretteWatching tired strangers pay a debt they won’t forgetThe narrow street leaks yellow light on actors in the nightWhile sirens scream their violence and I do not hear the soundI am far above the pavement, far above the muddy ground A woman fumbles

The Bell Family, Tennessee — Witch’s Landby Dawg Beneath the Tennessee canopy, in woods the sun avoids,a legend breeds in silence, where every branch destroysthe innocence of daylight and the comfort of the home–the Bell land, tainted earth where shadows prowl and roam. This cursed ground absorbs each whisper, every cry that slipsbetween the tangled

The Anniversary of the Death The date comes back each year without an invitation,the calendar page turns and there it is,the way a scar resumes its occupationof the skin despite the years, the quizof memory that the body keeps forever:where were you, what were you doing, who called,how many hours from the news to the

The Auditory Graveby Dawg Behold the architecture of a dark and greedy plan,a jagged throat of plaster built to terminate the man.I watched a woman scream until her lungs began to tear,but not a single frequency survived the heavy air. The hallway has an appetite for every human shout,it sucks the desperation from the center

The Adversary Before you get to love a proper enemy,you have to earn one first,Have to push hard enoughand long enough to make someone the worstOf their previous assumptions about what they could hold,Until the adversary standing opposite starts getting bold. He showed up at the moment when I needed opposition most,Not a friend and

The Aid Worker’s Prayer After twelve years of field work I have learned to pray efficiently,I’ve learned to drop the items I can’t solve sufficientlyfrom the list and focus on the ones where the variableof my specific work is actually valuable. The aid worker’s prayer at twelve years is a shorter document,the aid worker’s prayer