#m.a. schaffner

[bibliomancyoracle]

The real fear draws less from imagined attacks than from the wealth that crumbled in our hands.

*

from "Sonnet For This Week’s Terror Alert" by M.A. Schaffner

[behemothreview]

Two Poems

     M.A. Schaffner

Gospel Metro stops as stations of the cross; an ID on a lanyard, gentle crown. I never had to suffer; Christ never had a job. Who can cash a check with just a prayer?

It was beautiful in Gethsemane, lilac and roses scenting evening air. A shame there should be a fight and an ear spattering droplets on the perfumed soil.

I've tried a few words in meetings that went from bad to worse to typically nothing. No room for miracles if I had any. No comfort for the faithful not to be.

Years and years and at the end only the comfort he could take in pounding nails into frames and doorways he'd remember as the same sounds in his wrists, such lonely work. Improvements in Communications Management

Quiet as kestrels the messages fly device to device, thumb to not-quite-eye, vital as the average breath but swifter.

An improvement on talk, the words uttered as soon as thought, if not that much sooner, such progress in a string of characters.

Those languid conversations over a glass gone the way of cigarettes and a pen dipped hurriedly in ink at the post office.

The frantic search for coins at the call box as a stranger queues behind now vanished with a skilled staccato over copper wire,

a brush on bamboo slats, a folded quire: five thousand years of habits we can toss.

——-

Over the years, M. A. Schaffner has had poems published in Shenandoah, Prairie Schooner, Agni, Poetry Ireland, Poetry Wales, and elsewhere. Other writings include the poetry collection The Good Opinion of Squirrels, and the novel War Boys. Schaffner spends most days in Arlington, Virginia or the 19th century.