Thorny Fence
circa 1916
installation piece
wood, wire, soldier
Inexorably pinned down,
the body touches
neither earth nor sky,
floats like a Chagall
belly down
on wire on wood X-X.
Unable to charge, booted feet
dangle as wind whispers
through the thorny fence.
The eyes seek
a hand to harvest
photographs and letters
from mum and daddy,
a hand to lower the remains
into a grave
before rats go for the eyes
and burrow in.
No one approaches
for fear of machine gun fire,
and each night star shells burst
above the slowly bloating body.
No one remembers
his name, sleep coming to most
on another day.
Suicide Letter Composition 101
Make a good impression
by employing creative words
like melancholy, agony,
and desolation.
Use metaphors like Garden
of Gethsemane, a place
where your pals failed
you, all asleep at the wheel.
But refrain from naming names.
Nobody likes a crybaby;
just refer to spilled milk,
trite, but still a metaphor.
Survivors prefer a handwritten
note, the smell of decaying ink,
the tactile indentations of words
on the back like Braille
never to be understood
or explained. Always
leave them wanting
a little more.
Don Narkevic: Buckhannon, WV. MFA National University. Recent work appears in Street Cake, Neologism Poetry Journal, and Solum Literary Press.
Bindweed Magazine 
2 replies on “Don Narkevic – 2 poems”
Sigh. It seems easier to email a celebrity than a poet; such is our anodyne culture. In any event, having read a different poem in a different journal, I’d like to tell the poet I found it as evocative as Larkin’s The Explosion, the poem that sent me back to poetry. And thank you.
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[…] Don has contributed poetry to Bindweed and has been published in Issue 11. […]
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