New Poetry by Stuart Barnes

THE HAIRCUT

I like men

I like the masculine

- Peggy Lee

It's not the mirror I 
     despise 

but the mist as 
hard as a fist against
my face, the Freddy 
Krueger fingers, 
the concatenation of
florid adjectives, the
peroxide highlights,
O drug-fucked slut,
Ricardo, François, Shai.

- Stuart Barnes 2010

GRIEF’S

livid as the Führer’s flag, not sheepy-woolly grey.

Appalling, like the gorgons, a pall that smokes

the living, the dripping never expunged from the

Christmas china. Melbourne’s inclement weather,

a pail of tar, a shock of feathers, prevailed since

his positive diagnosis. Her blinded emerald eye,

their broken bones not knitted, enough to twist

this corkscrew through the Arctic, Hades’ gates.

The vacuum, black, in which no man survives.

- Stuart Barnes 2010