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  • Home
  • About
    • About Us
    • Contributors
    • Support Us
  • Submit
  • Current Issue
  • Archive
    • Volume I >
      • Issue I
      • Issue II
      • Issue III
      • Issue IV
    • Volume II >
      • Issue I
      • Issue II
      • Issue III
      • Issue IV
    • Volume III >
      • Issue I
      • Issue II
      • Issue III
      • Issue IV
    • Volume IV >
      • Issue I
      • Issue II
      • Issue III
      • Issue IV
    • Volume V >
      • Issue I
      • Issue II
      • Issue III
      • Issue IV
    • Volume VI >
      • Issue I
      • Issue II

The DWI

by Barry Green
Under the leaf is a shard, a small piece of broken glass
once part of a cover for a photo that hung on the wall of someone
who lived in blindness for a year after seeing his wife disappear
when he drove his car into a tree.
          He can still smell the odor of his breath
          on the night that he dozed into the oblivion
          of street lights, the crush of steel playing a symphony on his legs
          as the song of a scream became his anthem of loss.
When the stars reflect in the shard
he hears the music with its dissonance crashing,
strings of violas and cellos like cats in heat,
a vision behind his eye lids where scars are alive.

          The fallen leaves scatter with a wind gust
          and uncover bits of frame, a torn corner of the photo
          that he burned when he pulled the shard
          across his wrist.
His goodbye failed to rise above the clouds
but swirled over the loamy soil where he planted the seeds
that were meant to be his gift to a future,
trees that now bear no fruit.

          His perception ceased on the day he found the shard
          and the bits of photo and frame,
          that joined with him as he slept again
          ​into the oblivion of street lights.

Barry Green is retired and lives in Ashland, Virginia, where he writes poems and short fiction and tends a garden and the woods that surround it.