70 Seconds – Anna Ross

 

A small spark

A flicker, a flash

Blink and you miss it

A lone reaching flame

Small, steady, silent

Growing at both sides

A red hand waving

Calling for attention

Its journey begins

Rug, stool, chair, bookcase

Claiming them all

Flaring up, grasping

Ascending the curtains

Smoke pools above

Now unstoppable

All within is lost

Inferno rages

 


Anna Ross lives in North Yorkshire and works as a university administrator. She greatly enjoys reading and writing stories and poems of all shapes and sizes. Her short stories have been published across a range of anthologies. Though she is noted amongst her peers for writing literature with dark underlying themes and messages she is actually a very friendly person in the real world.

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Storm Warfare – Candace Armstrong

 

Charcoal smudges ashen sky

shot with silver missiles,

swept by gusty generals

commandeering the raid.

 

Smoke-like fog smothers russet

soil. Conifers stand at attention.

Snow settles on rocky

ridges in resignation.

 

“Storm Warfare” first appeared in Poaintry2: The Collision of Two Worlds.

 

_MG_0150-EditCandace Armstrong writes poetry in the beautiful woodlands of Southern Illinois. Her work has been published in The Lyric, Journal of Modern Poetry, Distilled Lives Vol 2 & 3, Midwest Journal, California Quarterly and others online. One of her sonnets was a winner in the Maria W. Faust Sonnet Contest in the summer of 2017. Sometimes the poetry becomes prose and has been published in Muse, Diverse Voices, and WOW-Women On Writing online as a finalist in their spring 2017 contest. She is an avid gardener and enjoys hiking with her husband and their canine child, Murphy.