New Poetry by Mark O'Flynn

ANNELIDS

(in September rain, for several days
a thousand earthworms,
clean and pink as intestines
rise out of the flooded ground
swimming in some mass saturation
on the concrete pathway
It’s not exactly a thousand,
I have not counted them, but many,
all with the same singular purpose.
How populated the soil is with living things,
for when the rain stops
and the path dries up
the worms shrivel and bake
like brackets, leaving not a footfall
of concrete on which to tread,
the earth hollow with their leaving,
the corpulent ducks too heavy to fly.)


- Mark O'Flynn 2009



EDGE

the knife edge dream
the cliff-top dream
the empty well
the windy skyscraper
it’s always the same
the paralysed view
the bottomless canyon
the rotten top-most branch
the crumbling edge about to topple
into the chasm
the racing pulse
the sweat so cold
the grace of flight
don’t get me started on flight.


- Mark O'Flynn 2009

Mark O'Flynn's most recent collection, What Can Be Proven, came out in 2007 through Interactive Press. He still has the great bounty of a dear and loving family, a very cute dog, and the good luck to have finally lost me as a neighbour. His poetry remains a compelling mixture of the tender and the sonorous, the hug and the bristle, even without my hairy visage propped on his fence.