New Poetry by JD DeHart

Stone Ballerina

How strange, in shapes
of granite or marble,
the thin leg rises, the toe
refuses to curl, standing
the entire being on one small
fragment of space, while
a cardinal settles on her 
outstretched finger, threatening
to upend the ensemble,
bringing the dancer down
in a series of pebbles.


The Power of an Edit

Take your acumen and point
it somewhere else.
I've got no use for parsing
each verb that comes out of
my mouth.  Do not question
my absence of comma, my
floating appreciation of apostrophes.
Life is just a series of nouns
and other words.
Is that a prepositional phrase
in line three?  No manner
or matter.  I'll not reduce my utterance
to a series of critical marks.


- JD DeHart 2017

JD DeHart is a writer and teacher.  His work has recent appeared at Strange Poetry and Cacti Fur.