The wolf, its eyes hard yellow on the windows, pacing in the black and glassy tar-darkness on soft pads, trampling the roses and spiked blue petalous hyacinths.
why not a dancer landing the instant she rises - entrechat?
Panting in loud broken shards, sounds of animal spittle as it falls in slurs on the grass, wet insinuations on the back of my hand.
when our bodies have perished, we do not. What to do, then, with all these loose, wandering, bodiless souls?
Lifts the words right off the page, just the way the writer might have dreamed a cough somewhere—perhaps one of the children.
a rat twitches his nose and scurries under foot looking around for a friend
Charles D. Tarlton grew up in California, but lives now on the shore in Old Saybrook, Connecticut, with his wife, Ann Knickerbocker, an abstract painter, and Nikki and Jesse, their two standard poodles. His poetry has appeared in such places as Rattle, Blackbox Manifold (UK), London Grip (UK), Ilanot Review, Gone Lawn, 2River, and The Journal (UK). He has published several poetry collections.