UNCLE RUDI —after Gerhard Richter, 1965 Based on a family snap the artist’s uncle stands a warrior posed in grand regalia, facing the camera head on, two columns of buttons front his winter coat with smeared eagles and almost invisible lightning bolts on the collar and epaulets, a swastika perched on his cap. Smiling like […]

Day 1: Kurt Cobain’s bore held with essence-snarling potion. Day 2: Funnel-tubed by diagnosticians, Bound-to- happen morgue rattle an inexhaustible threat. Day 3: Overhanging suffocation in firm plastic hood. Day 4: In sea thirst Guerrilla dogs racket. Day 5: Oblivion dithers, clocks refuse to tick. Christopher Barnes’ first collection LOVEBITES is published by Chanticleer.  Each […]

For my father   You keep him alive with longing and regret, memory a patient spider lashing someone once living to that yesterday when his story stopped   and you became one of those spirits divorced from morning sun, riding an iceberg calved from the land, looking shoreward at dusk.   But all the metaphors […]

one winter alone in your little cabin you worked meticulously on model ships fingers looped thread after thread—tied tiny knots   made sails: red silk sails blue sails the color of cornflower stiff white sails cut from a sheet, glued, and dried   from each deck you positioned cannons— stealth down to the least detail […]