When I was 10, I had a gift. I knewwhat chirping silence meant to frogs. George Cassidy Payne is a poet from Rochester, NY. His work has been included in such publications as the Hazmat Review, Moria Poetry Journal, Chronogram Journal, Ampersand Literary Review, The Angle at St. John Fisher College, and 3:16 Journal. George’s blogs, essays and letters have appeared in USA Today, The Wall Street […]
reflection
As Benedictines
We see a single incandescent light beneath the pond,a flash at the bottom of four stemmed glasses, as if we were still in the Orleanais,where sins are garnished with clams and stewed in the finest vichyssoise. George Cassidy Payne is a poet from Rochester, NY. His work has been included in such publications as the Hazmat Review, Moria Poetry Journal, Chronogram Journal, Ampersand Literary Review, The […]
Stormy Night
There is a loneliness to hail dropson a tin-roofed cabin.The woods and flowers and secrets ofmountains are lonely.So are the trails, ponds, and bridges; the vanished sources looking for a beginning.Dripping drops a million years in the making. Falling asleep in the wounded soil of dreams. George Cassidy Payne is a poet from Rochester, NY. His work has been included in […]
When Film Took More Than Time
I found this pictureof myself when Iwas less than a year old-September 1981 – in my mother’s arms, wading near a beach on the American side of the St. Lawrence River.She held me by my pits with a smile good enough to getmy father’s attention. George Cassidy Payne is a poet from Rochester, NY. His work has been included in […]
Like Raindrops
I am not a Buddhist (neither was he)I am a followerof the neonlight of liberation Free of being rightI strive to seehow my poetry can hold many truths, all of themsentenced todeath George Cassidy Payne is a poet from Rochester, NY. His work has been included in such publications as the Hazmat Review, Moria Poetry Journal, Chronogram Journal, Ampersand Literary Review, The Angle at St. John Fisher College, and 3:16 […]
The Earth Is An Ordinary Friend
the oughtness of an ant&the secret codes of Hawthorn treesThe way Socrates said yes to the hemlockshe was an ordinary friend. That feelingof being stuckin paradise George Cassidy Payne is a poet from Rochester, NY. His work has been included in such publications as the Hazmat Review, Moria Poetry Journal, Chronogram Journal, Ampersand Literary Review, The Angle at St. John Fisher College, and 3:16 Journal. George’s blogs, […]
Is This How I Wanted it to Go?
A forest away from the pulsationsof thinking. A forest still as raindrops falling off red pine needles.My ancestors. In this forest.I am not alive, in this forest.I know as a ghost knows,a lovely, fragile, shale hunger returning broken from my handshung between the womb andwilderness,as it is born, a great disk-shapedsystem of gas, an accident of the cosmos. George Cassidy Payne is […]
To Die Like Marat
The death of Marat wasbad, but at least he lookedgood.I don’t want to go out a slob,nothing against slobs.I want to die handsome, likeMarat, or at least the way Jacques-Louis David saw himwith a letter in his hand and the sunlight casting a golden shadowon his shoulders, forehead, and left forearm.Stabbed to death by a […]
A Yellow Cardinal
Genetics could be the sole factor the same way roots of hemlocksthirst for affection like toddlers, some say it is an obscure type ofhermaphroditism, or some other theoryperhaps the reason pumice smellsthe way it does, or the words surface to life from the lips of the newly awakenedshining like a natural sermon, burning phosphorous and strikingthe earth, beneath the polar auroras yes, a yellow cardinal isno rarer than the redno less […]
No Longer Lost
Artwork by catzz Becoming many-celled,bright red to orange,existing by thoughts alone,barely living from thesun, mountainous, even coniferous,pink-tinged, with unlaced shoes, uncombed hair, and handmade signs, broke loose for the first time, making deathhowl, between a porno shop and a truck stopdiner, they said Buffalo was 20 minutesaway and then it happened. Too young to age,too old to […]