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

 

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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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February 28, 2022 by foxglovejournal Categories: Poetry, UncategorizedTags: Anna Ross, attention, creative, creativity, fire, flame, flicker, grasp, growth, hand, inferno, journey, loss, poem, poet, Poetry, rage, smoke, spark, time, UK, writing, Yorkshire Leave a comment

The Welder’s Song – Len Kuntz

 

This is the sound of breaking

Then melting

A sort of soldering

Smell of burnt steel lining the nostrils now

Sparks from the welder’s flame

Shooting 4^th of July bright

Landing on tennis shoes

And cracked cement

Hitting skin

 

This is the sound of love

Fierce devotion

The kind of rapt attention lovers

Show one another when they can’t say

If they’ll ever see each other again

Noticing moles and blurred scars

Seeing it all again for the first time.

 

I wished he would show me that–

The love a welder has for his torch and metal

I wished he would solder me back into a boy

If only half of one

Watching him work I wished so many things

That by the time my father finished his piece

And held it up to the light with a smile

There was nothing left to wish for

 

Len Kuntz is a writer from Washington State, an editor at the online magazine Literary Orphans, and the author of I’M NOT SUPPOSED TO BE HERE AND NEITHER ARE YOU, a story collection out from Unknown Press.  You can also find him at lenkuntz.blogspot.com.

June 5, 2017 by foxglovejournal Categories: PoetryTags: creative, creativity, devotion, family, flame, humanity, Len Kuntz, life, love, memory, metal, past, poem, Poetry, scars, senses, skin, steel, torch, US, WA, work, writing 1 Comment

Fire – John Grey

 

I touched fire when two

and I’ve not forgotten.

I was burnt, bubbled, red,

darkened, and the flame

burned so pretty too.

 

I glanced longingly

at the liquid in dark bottles

but my mother snatched

them away.

Likewise the taunting

sharp edge of a knife.

And the patio railing

that invited me to climb.

 

But with fire

she was not quick enough.

I learned that lesson

the hard way.

You can suffer in your hand

what your heart endures.

You can shriek

a kind of glory

until the salving butter comes.

 

John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident. His work has recently been published in New Plains Review, Stillwater Review and Big Muddy Review, and is upcoming in Louisiana Review, Columbia College Literary Review and Spoon River Poetry Review.

February 8, 2017 by foxglovejournal Categories: Poetry, UncategorizedTags: Australia, burn, childhood, creative, creativity, danger, fire, flame, hand, heart, John Grey, lesson, memory, mistake, pain, past, poem, Poetry, suffering, US, writing, youth Leave a comment