~ Delta Poetry Review ~

Flannery

There are times I’d give

my eyes

for a black train

headed to a bleak city

and a fiery blaze

for plunging,

to purge that freak,

myself,

of self.

Haunted, hounded, mind

not right,

I’m a realist too, sir,

and feel

at the utterance

of every strange

struggling sentence

the depth of distances

between self

and that word

that began everything.

Though I hobble now

among peahens

on these aluminum crutches,

I’ll make my way

soon enough

to the fire

and I know who I’ll leave

in the flames.

Steven Ostrowski is a poet, fiction writer, and painter. His work appears in literary journals, magazines and anthologies. He is the author of five chapbooks –four of poems and one of stories. He and his son Ben Ostrowski are the authors of a full-length collaboration called Penultimate Human Constellation published in 2018 by Tolsun Books. His chapbook, After the Tate Modern, won the 2017 Atlantic Road Prize and is published by Island Verse Editions. He teaches at Central Connecticut State University.