New Poetry by Phillip Ellis

Once on a Beach

Once, when I was writing with my fingertips
on a beachbroad slate of sand, I turned to look
to where my feet had marred, and I wondered, then,
whether the wind would easily erase them.

I wondered whether every trace of myself
would suffer the frottage that is erasure,
as the wind would rub away my feet's passage
between its fingers as if contemplating.

And the wind had whispered low, and the sand hissed
as the grains were sporadically hustled in,
and I turned away then, as if born fearful,
afraid to see mortality in the face.


- Phillip Ellis 2013

BIO: Phillip A. Ellis is a freelance critic, poet and scholar. His chapbooks, The Flayed Man, Symptoms Positive and Negative and Arkham Monologues, are available. He is working on a collection for Diminuendo Press. Another has been accepted by Hippocampus Press. He is the editor of Melaleuca. His website is at http://www.phillipaellis.com/