Winter's Last Apple
By Ken Poyner
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About this ebook
A collection of poems, prose poems, and micro-fiction pieces, speculative and surreal, which touch upon various aspects of villainy, saintliness, debauchery, responsibility and discovery. These pieces have appeared in as diverse a swath of magazines as "Asimov's Science Fiction", "Grievous Angel", "Unbroken Journal", "Rune Bear", "Pank" and dozens of others.
Ken Poyner
Ken Poyner has published more than 200 stories and 1200 poems in more than 200 journals and magazines, both print and web based. His books include "Cordwood" (poetry), 1985; "Sciences, Social" (poetry), 1995; "Constant Animals" (fictions), 2013; "The Book of Robot"; (poetry), 2016; "Victims of a Failed Civics"; (poetry), 2016; "Avenging Cartography"; (fictions), 2017; "The Revenge of the House Hurlers" (fictions), 2018; and more, with his latest being speculative poetry in "Lessons From Lingering Houses", 2022. He has taught creative writing on a Poets in the Schools Virginia teaching fellowship; and given readings, or taught seminars, at Bucknel University, George Washington University, the Bethesda Writers Center, and elsewhere. He has been nominated for multiple Pushcart prizes, multiple Rhysling and Dwarf Stars awards, the Sidewise award, and several Best of the Net awards. His work appears in a number of contemporary anthologies. He is known for his surreal and Irreal topics and methods.
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Winter's Last Apple - Ken Poyner
WINTER’S LAST APPLE
An empty morning rises with snow between our windows. The white pressing on our sills tries to slip under the stoic wood, and has its words for us. I hunger for the warmth of your thriving heart. I can see through the shatters of snow the outline of your small room – the table, the mirror, the closet door held ajar by your own flop-eared and grievously tempting closet monster, even the anthrax sealed envelope of your love’s lasting love lying unopened – where surely you wait coiled in bed like a pity, dimly aware of the man across but a brief way: the man thinking in his metal idleness of your heart, and the warmth it might be in anyone’s hands. No, in his.
A HISTORY OF BIOPHYSICS
Once a drawer of ghosts is filled
I shut it and connect the latch
So it will not slide unattended open.
Ghosts need their routine. So I fold
And catalogue. I note, about each,
Its circumstance of special attributes:
So many idiosyncrasies – but enough
Idiosyncrasies pooled, and the lot of them
Make a colossal ordinary. I cannot
Come to that conclusion too soon.
Each ghost for a while deserves
A modicum of respect. But it is
Inevitable – tray after tray of ghosts,
Each perhaps alone a haunting of merit;
Taken together in their great weightless mass
A background hum that is just the noise
Of the Universe coming, the Universe going.
It is my routine, and I know it.
ALLEGING ROMANCE
You assemble the car out of ordinary things: cabinetry, dining room chairs, a bed worn out, three chickens and an old dog from Henley’s. Its engine is the heart of a bear. You draw the choke and the heart sputters, coughs itself into rhythm, pushes blood into the axles. You proudly slip into the barbed wire seat, pull a feather to signal you are entering the public street. On her porch, your future wife is turning over furniture, prying at loose boards – her long, rusting chain dress blindly seducing the broken porch light – her mouth worriedly wicking where oh where is my thundering bear?
CHILDREN IN THE RAFTERS
I hear they inhabit
The girders at the tops of unused warehouses,
Comfortable in the cramp
Of supporting joists and bracing beams, yet
Buffered by all the empty space below.
Even with rusted skylights and missing panels,
There is still enough dark left at the roof to eat them
Like the last of this week’s groceries.
Listen: you can hear them shifting,
Swaying on the senile metal, wrapped
Four limbs around a weight bearing pylon:
A building and a subspecies indivisible.
I am not afraid of them. Some
Say they will drop molding ceiling tiles
On the unconcerned passing below,
Piss on your halo as you angel-step through.
My little brothers. At home in no home,
Watching the abandoned family abandoning,
Watching them scurry at ground level while,
Almost human, they claim the warehouse air
And the right to drop whatever they want.
I am always concerned, and when
I take the shortcut through this rotting post-worth
Construction, if I have one I drop
A penny or a nickel on the floor,
Sometimes the still grieving half
Of a cigarette. I imagine I can hear
The shadow excitement above me; and when
I come back through, as safe one way as
The other, always what I have left them
Is gone.
SEASIDE EMBRACE
I remember us at the beach. You wore one of those one piece bathing suits with the cut-out sides, and I had full shorts and a t-shirt. The rapt pier lights kept us far enough away. The water was muscling in crabs. The crabs started picking at the fish. Then, they noticed us. I could see their eyestalks waving. They collected themselves, claws clacking out what only just then I understood was language. You did not recognize it. I could not translate it for either of us, but I knew it was a terrible language of injury and dissolution and that surely its contents were directed at us. And then they came: dozens, perhaps hundreds, perhaps thousands. You did not see the danger, but, ever the dutiful lover, you ran when I said run and we sped parallel to the shoreline, a gathering of crabs carving the sand behind us. You seemed excited by your breathing. I was thinking we could not run with only the water at our side: we needed to turn and run inland. Likely you were never there and I have never been to the beach, but I have been smuggling crabs into the old barn out back, trying to translate the awful clack they make between themselves, a language