Contributor: Perry L. Powell

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That owl resting on the funeral home
surveys the evening like a wanton judge.
I have passed beneath those curled wings before,
and no salvaging thoughts grew from my head.
Nor do they come today as I stroll by.

But when I walked that parking lot that day
all my happiness dead in a wooden box,
wisdom arrived as the ashes of a heart
and time sang like a debased currency.

The all that we didn't want when it arrived,
the little love we might yet have given,
those last rays of sun that broke the trees loose,
the winter nights that stalked us through the streets,
what could they ever say about this or that?


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Perry L. Powell's work has appeared in Leaves of Ink, Cattails, Chrysanthemum, Futures Trading, Miller's Pond, The Wales Haiku Journal, vox poetica, and winamop, among other places.

Contributor: Perry L. Powell

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So this is what it is to be naked
kneeling in the jaundiced snow
as the cormorants array themselves
like Isaiah's angels
on the bare branched elm.

This is the dream that went
North for the winter.
Faith of my heart, sing your song
and then let us put
old Bismark to bed.

And this is how it is to be left
when the candles fly away
and it seems we stand on the dark pier
in a moment without tickets.


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Perry L. Powell is a systems analyst who lives near Atlanta, Georgia in the United States. His work has appeared a number of venues, including Leaves of Ink, Aphelion, eyedrum periodically, Frogpond, Futures Trading, The Heron's Nest, The Innisfree Poetry Journal, and vox poetica.

Contributor: Perry L. Powell

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Can I stand just on my rhetoric
or watch the pile of oak leaves turn
to brown mush like dead hands sinking
back into the stillness of autumn?
I am too old to climb the stairs now.
All the sweet skins I have known are gone.
My brain, like a ground squirrel, burrows
into its skull to wait for winter.

If this is a journey I must take,
no daylight can accompany me.
Like you, I will go to nowhere plain
and those who remember will remember
for just a while, for long enough that
the leaves will lose all their last shapes.


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Perry L. Powell lives near Atlanta, and spends evenings wishing things had been different. Because they aren't, he writes various poems and prose, some of which have appeared in Aphelion, Atavic Poetry, Frogpond, Futures Trading, Mobius, and Modern Haiku.