Continuing our posting of members’ poems, here are some more for you to enjoy…
Dead Air
Grant Stone
If you have a speaker, copper wire, a handful of transistors
and the bones from a dead man’s ears
you can make a kind of radio.
Take it to the graveyard, up and down the dial-
-mostly static, but if you listen close
you can hear the whispers of those gone.
Do not cry
or speak
or make any sound at all:
if you can hear the ghosts, they can hear you too.
Your living voice will draw them like a flame-
they will follow you home to hear you talk
And tell their friends
until the air is so thick with them
that you cannot breathe.
Say nothing.
~First published in Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine.
Grant Stone’s stories have appeared in Shimmer, Strange Horizons, Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, Semaphore and have twice won the Sir Julius Vogel Award. He’s also one-third of the Cerberus Writing Band, along with Dan Rabarts and Matthew Sanborn Smith.
‘TEMPERANCE’
Deryn Pittar
The whisky has got me tight in its thrall,
Today’s rude surprises I can clearly recall.
I need to do something drastic and brave
and give up the booze, ‘cause my mind’s blown away.
(A day’s worth of thinking: it must be the drinking)
A snake that twirled on the back of a goat,
a dragon that snorted out thick purple smoke.
Thirteen chickens that danced in a circle
and a rat that rode on a spider called Myrtle
(I know what you’re thinking: I should curb my drinking)
Fairies in gumboots, pink pigs with large wings,
an axe-wielding coon-cat and a rabbit that sings.
Four men on a see-saw, no clothes on- no shame,
they danced up and down, not a stitch to their name.
(The neighbours are thinking: I have to stop drinking.)
Then yesterday evening without any warning,
three burly policemen, with helmets, came calling.
They recited a list, had I seen any sign
of all of the above, or one at a time?
So it wasn’t the booze and it isn’t my mind,
just a passing-through circus from planet De-Vine.
Through a hole in the ozone they escaped without keepers,
but I will change my nightcap to fresh lime and bitters.
~Deryn writes Sci-Fi (Romance and serious stuff), Young Adult, short fiction and poetry.
Deryn’s books in these genres are available at https://www.amazon.com/Deryn-Pittar/e/B00JAEN1GW