Home

Autumn/Winter Issue

Summer 2004 Issue

Winter 2004 Issue

Summer 2003 Issue

Editor's Note

Guidelines

SNR's Writers

Mail

in the desert of stars

The river passes the city
like a step on a path.
The journey to stay in place
is never completed.
The noise, the lights, go on and off.
The racket of living and dying.

The ripples break and flow.
The sky goes dark again.
The scales of a lizard
scrape against a wilting weed.

headache

Is it a hangover
or a tumor?
The tightness behind my eye
as if it had been twisted
sideways like a dial
comes and almost goes.

The aspirin hasn't helped yet;
neither have the beers.
Groans hover like spies.
The poem has helped
a little bit....
Perhaps I should take two.

New Year's Eve

The mouth is a wet cave
where appetite gathers,
a bristling pack that rubs
angry and eager

against one another, looks
to the white-ribbed sky
as the howl builds within,
hollow:  deny

more and more what is
for what will be,
the blooded promise of change,
of a destiny.

Remains of the latest feast
course through the flesh,
an ancient dance, a prayer
of constricted rush.



J.B. Mulligan is married, with three grown children, and has had poems and stories in dozens of magazines, recently including The King's English, The Ghazal Page, Riversedge, Voices in the Roses, Kaleidowhirl, and Pebble Lake Review. Samisdat Press has published two of his chapbooks: The Stations of the Cross and THIS WAY TO THE EGRESS.



Copyright 2005, J.B. Mulligan. This work is protected under the U.S. copyright laws. It may not be reproduced, reprinted, reused, or altered without the expressed written permission of the author.