Four Poems

About Us: Non Grata is a print magazine aiming to revitalize reading. The following poems were originally published in our Summer issue, “Fiction from the Underground,” available for purchase now.

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Drop Me Like a Pebble

Drop me like a pebble into

the moonlit night.

A silent splash, a ripple across

the warped pale light.

To vanish with the blue of twilight,

sleep with fish wrapped in

blackness like silk,

bearing me down, knowing

I’m drowning but I go on sleeping.

Stepping Lightly

Stepping lightly over stardust glass

And furious cracks,

Bending for the flowers,

Breathing beneath the moon

Swimming in purple azure.

Walking by, my shadow grinning

Back from the rippling shore,

Cloudswans drifting,

Trees reaching high into

The mirror sky.

The city rises into the dark

Like suspended embers from flames.

I sift through the mire instead,

Amidst the dark, my footfalls

Whispering over the grass.

My fingers graze the outreached

Hands of dead friends and voices

That were never heard.

I choked on my tears and had no desire to join them.

I walked down quiet streets

A few hours before sunrise,

Saw sleepers in their blankets

And rats in their arms.

Come dawn I reached the river.

It swallowed the night and its shadows that followed me.

They wriggled in its current

And were carried away.

Up There

You will see on the darkwood

shore, a grinning mirror,

shadow in my sockets,

and know that my final hour is nearly run.

Tic-tic, my bed will be a swell

of earth,

the leaves my blanket.

In the closing hush teased by

laughing logs winking into the night.

Give one more cry that the forest

may hear,

and send wolves affright,

Howling – trembling – scattering mad

into the night.

Where I Wandered

Death’s tune became

near stranger to me,

the rot in my eye, my spit and sudden snaps.

I had to get away.

Where I wandered, I saw it

in everyone around me, singing a decrepit choir

while skulls bounced like bats from telephone wires.

If I died in this city, I would be a frothing puddle,

trash, shoveled and tossed for the heap, a stain on the stones.

I thought I could find more with so little else,

in sour pastures,

beneath blossoming trees.

Here, Death means something.

Here my teeth can fall from my mouth like pines

and shivering acorns.

My tears will salt the lips of meandering fish.

My flesh will be stuffed down the throats

of baby crows.

At night the beasts can pick through

my bones.

My voice will be starlings

dipping their toes in the lake,

the sound of a hawk devouring

its prey.

Perhaps a fire, a sip from the flask,

before shadow falls like a grinning mask.