The May Editor's Pick Poet is

Paul Sohar

Please feel free to email Paul at: sohar.paul@gmail.com

DANSE MACABRE

You can walk and sleep and eat alone
but to dance you need at least one partner,
better yet a whole dance-floor-full
on a plaza of an ancient town festooned

with songs and restless music that tie
the dancers together into one monster
with the dancers becoming its limbs;
you are one hand and your partner another,

trembling to the same heartbeat,   
yowling the same prayers to a purple sky
that clasps its hands together even while
making one hand dissect  the other, letting          

naked blood embrace the dance;
what the music cuts, the hot beat heals while
dancing couples lie together after the dance,
they lie and love and then love and lie;  sooner
or later all become the monster’s limbs, and
the monster knows only how to sing and dance.

NIGHT VISITING

Night comes into the house
just as I am about to fall asleep,
but I don’t hear the outside door,
only feel the echo of a squeak or a slow slam
when the dull drum roll of the footsteps
begins to throb; left-right, left-right,
or is it the other way around?
Two feet carryon a desultory dialog
with an ostinato of silence.
Then something falls.
Maybe a chair is knocked over
in the dining room, or a rug catches a shoe.
Night is clumsy
just like me
when I come home late,
drunk and eager to go to bed
where I lie waiting for the dark footsteps
to creep up and smother me
with a black pillow of sleep.

THE RHYTHM OF LIFE

Dragging slippers
drag on deck
footsteps climb up
on my neck
by the time they
reach my brain
nothing stops the
dragging train
stepping slowly
on the soft
squishy matter
up aloft
squeezing salty
fluids out
through my ears and
silent shout
through the fingers
wrapped to hold
dancing eyeballs
in their fold
through the nostrils
and the skin
leaving nothing
but the din
locked inside this
vacant skull
left unfurnished
dead and dull

Paul Sohar got to pursue his life-long interest in literature full time when he went on disability from his job in a chemistry lab. The results have slowly showed up in Agni, Bryant Literary Review, Chiron Review, Grain, Hotel Amerika, International Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, Main Street Rag, Rattle, and many others.

Paul has seven books of translations into English from his native Hungarian language, but now a volume of his own poetry titled Homing Poems is available from Iniquity Press. His latest book is titled True Tales of a Fictitious Spy, and it is creative nonfiction about the Stalinist gulag in Hungary.

You can find Homing Poems HERE.