Ryan G. Van Cleave
Traveler's Advisory
Sunset has disassembled into empty lavatory darkness.
Nothing but you and a blue papier-mâché moon
that’s thirty-some floors above, a predatory stranger
who watches you watching it watching you.
if only you had a stick, a heavy wooden bat, but no.
The emergency broadcast warning reaffirms that no
one should risk this starless August drama that’s stranger
than barges on the horizon, a stretch of lights roping darkness.
The way mist sits low in the trees as a million tiny moons
is like the intermittent Verdi the radio spits at you.
Wedging the car onto a gravel shoulder, you know
something’s wrong, that the long-awaited honeymoon
is over. Kaput. In the window glaze of steam, you
trace the outline of rain lilies against the growing darkness.
The plowhorse patience of it all seems stranger and stranger.
Perhaps it’s the anticipation of the twisters that sizzle through you,
makes you wait it out like the sun stalking the bastard moon.
Now all this quiet accompanies your profound mental darkness.
You realize you and your senses have parted again, still strangers.
Gray rain smacks the window and the car begins to shake. Oh no.
Page(s) 85
magazine list
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- Agenda
- Ambit
- Angel Exhaust
- ARTEMISpoetry
- Atlas
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- Candelabrum
- Cannon's Mouth, The
- Chroma
- Coffee House, The
- Dream Catcher
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- Erbacce
- Fabric
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- Floating Bear, The
- French Literary Review, The
- Frogmore Papers, The
- Global Tapestry
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- Interpreter's House, The
- Iota
- Journal, The
- Lamport Court
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- Magma
- Matchbox
- Matter
- Modern Poetry in Translation
- Monkey Kettle
- Moodswing
- Neon Highway
- New Welsh Review
- North, The
- Oasis
- Obsessed with pipework
- Orbis
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- Painted, spoken
- Paper, The
- Pen Pusher Magazine
- Poetry Cornwall
- Poetry London
- Poetry London (1951)
- Poetry Nation
- Poetry Review, The
- Poetry Salzburg Review
- Poetry Scotland
- Poetry Wales
- Private Tutor
- Purple Patch
- Quarto
- Rain Dog
- Reach Poetry
- Review, The
- Rialto, The
- Second Aeon
- Seventh Quarry, The
- Shearsman
- Smiths Knoll
- Smoke
- South
- Staple
- Strange Faeces
- Tabla Book of New Verse, The
- Thumbscrew
- Tolling Elves
- Ugly Tree, The
- Weyfarers
- Wolf, The
- Yellow Crane, The