Aug 24, 2017 | Autumn, Gus Stevens, Rhymed Couplets
The thorn branches are a knot of tangled capillaries. They quarter armies of spiders standing silent and sentinel over the blackest of the blackberries– the last and heaviest summer sweet before the coming rot. These are the scouts and outriders of the advancing...
Jul 6, 2017 | Gus Stevens, Humor, Terza Rima
“During this time, the mother and the child are removed from the enclosure for their safety.” We read the sign and then filed underground to the male Gorilla’s lair where he lived for the present time alone; they’d been known, even to kill...
May 14, 2017 | Grief, Gus Stevens, Quatrains
When he broke, the yoke of him spilled out and there was an anger in his sadness. Horror at the young boy’s laughing shout, the sickening mirth and ringing gladness over the destruction his hands had wrought. The boys had found the nest beneath the leaves on a...
Apr 23, 2017 | Alexandrine, Bible Story, Gus Stevens, Lot, Pentameter, Quatrains
In the court of God, Abram asked for sinful men if he’d spare the many for the sake of the few. But fifty could not be found, nor forty, nor ten; he dared not ask for one because he knew. He knew that even righteous Lot shared in their shame; he knew the Law...
Feb 23, 2017 | Acrostic, Gus Stevens, Humor, Italian Sonnet, Sonnet
A crostics, the poems assigned to school C hildren because they don’t yet know how to R hyme or count syllables—the teachers tool O nce they’ve learned their letters and the first few S ounds that blend together to make up words. T imothy begins with the...
Feb 13, 2017 | Gus Stevens, Love, Multi-Syllabic Rhyme, Sonnet, Victorian Sonnet
Today’s the second month and fourteenth day of yet another year. When paper hearts are cut from folded pink and Love portrayed as a cartoon infant, blind and armed with darts to skewer Spring’s first sons. Meanwhile pitchmen ply their wares: the...
