The June Editor's Pick Poet is Brian Rosenberger

Please feel free to email Brian at: brosenberger@earthlink.net

THE FORGOTTEN CASTLE

It exists in dreams.
It exists in nightmares.
Lot for sale. Buyer beware.
Between cobwebs and dust.
In bedrooms, where lovers or at least,
Shared dreamers, the Hopeful and Hopeless,
Scarred their flesh with disposable razors
With images of the Castle.
In caves where a body hangs and
In the pooling blood,
Maps are drawn and redrawn. 
Artist, addict, cartographer, all go mad in their quest,
If they weren’t already.
In a flea market, between the caged chickens,
rusty firearms, bruised vegetables,  there is stack of books.
No cover. No dust jacket. Not a signed author’s copy.
This book recounts a visitor’s stay at the Castle.
His visit to Heaven and Hell.
The book is untitled, has no cover, no author.
It is forgotten, looked over, forgotten, like the Castle.
Perhaps that is best.

THE CREEK

Dark surface, ripples like storm clouds gathering
Dead bodies dance beneath the current
Their stories only told in whispers if told at all

A DIFFICULT BIRTH

The rain stormed down,
Transforming our farmland into mud.
The rooster crowed, more like a scream.
Two goats disappeared two nights before.
And now a third was missing.
Father discovered a single carcass.
He said in a whisper, wolves.
I remember his hands, the color of rust.

I flinched in anger at his lie.
We’d never seen a single wolf on our land,
Nor any dead livestock, not even a chicken,
Stolen by a coyote or wild dog.
Father was a farmer, a hunter, a man of God,
Prone to neither anger nor fear.
Traits I, his son, inherited or so believed.

It was like yesterday,
Mother screaming, sounding like the rooster,
As she struggled, giving birth to my brother.
I had always wanted a Brother or even a Sister,
Someone to share things with, even our burden, my burden.
What did I know at that young age of burdens?
Everything.

My Aunt, Mother’s sister, served as midwife.
Her hands, bloody, as little brother
Clawed his way to freedom.
First, a head adorned with two small horns.
And finally the tail.
The constant screaming.
Father yelling, “Where’s the knife?”

Years later, my family dead and dust. All of them.
Father in an unmarked grave. No Christian burial for him.
I have no one to pass on this tale.
So I pass it onto you.
I am still my Father’s son.
I touch my forehead,
Every night, every morn,
Dreading what I might feel.

Brian Rosenberger lives in a cellar in Marietta, GA (USA) and writes by the light of captured fireflies. He is the author of As the Worms Turns and three poetry collections. He is also a featured contributor to the Pro-Wrestling literary collection, Three-Way Dance, available from Gimmick Press.