What Rough Beast | Poem for November 21, 2019

Mark Ward
Untitled Tanka and Haiku Sequence

dreamt a starring role
the director gives cold reads
stages discomfort—
the ham hock blushes, offers
wilting slices of itself

body drugged kidnapped
weighted sinking close your eyes—
dawn yawns, hesitates

oceanlight shimmers—
squinting as the fluorescent
lights escape their cage

the duvet swaddles,
suffocates the day
whose glare, interrogative,
is unwilling, unable
to forgive your flow

festival launch—
the ship’s figurehead unmoors
swan dives to applause

Mark Ward is the author of the chapbooks Circumference (Finishing Line Press, 2018) and Carcass (Seven Kitchens Press, 2020). His poems have appeared in The Irish Times, Poetry Ireland Review, Cordite, and Softblow, among other journals, as well as in anthologies including Lovejets: Queer Male Poets on 200 Years of Walt Whitman (Squares & Rebels, 2019), edited by Raymond Luczak. He is the founding editor of Impossible Archetype, an international journal of LGBTQ+ poetry. Online at A Stint in Your Spotlight

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