A Cautionary Distillation of Unspoken Desires
The white table is red.
The sun is merely a theory,
but it’s a good one. The moon
crawled beneath the door to
offer a ghostly morning.
My trip through the body
has been longer than expected.
Distance does not think highly of
itself, so it works harder.
A barge loaded with bad ideas drifts
down the wonderful useless river.
The red table is white.
A cube of pride sits on a plate
next to a cube of remorse. A thread of
despair sews the islands together.
The sailor reassembled his ship
inside the vast cave, so that no one
could ever sail it away.
Make your mind like a stone––
hard to enter, impossible to leave,
but slowly separating into parts
that will have lives of their own.
Rich Ives has received grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Artist Trust, Seattle Arts Commission and the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines for his work in poetry, fiction, editing, publishing, translation and photography. His writing has appeared in Verse, North American Review, Dublin Quarterly, Massachusetts Review, Northwest Review, Quarterly West, Iowa Review, Poetry Northwest, Virginia Quarterly Review, Fiction Daily and many more. He is the 2009 winner of the Francis Locke Memorial Poetry Award from Bitter Oleander. In 2011 he received a nomination for The Best of the Web and two nominations for both the Pushcart Prize and The Best of the Net. He is the 2012 winner of the Creative Nonfiction Prize from Thin Air magazine. His book of days, Tunneling to the Moon, is currently being serialized with a work per day appearing for all of 2013 at http://silencedpress.com/.
Euphony Journal 