Art: Marie Dashkova, @melodyphoto
THE TACTICAL UNIT’S SHARPSHOOTER MISSES HIS FIRST SHOT BUT NOT HIS SECOND
Darkness obscures everything
even my once luminous dreams,
the man waving the gun above his head
says as if reciting a poem
to an audience of Martians.
He did say we were overrun
by Martians before he issued
his threat to the street corner
of bad-luck morning pedestrians
now frozen in their tracks.
If anyone moves you will meet
your Maker before your time,
he warns eloquently and thinks,
On Mars, of course, no one dies
no one is ignored or despised
no one goes hungry or is lonely.
The tactical unit’s sharpshooter
who yesterday had taken his young son
to a film about space travel
landing on another planet, not Mars,
has the frenzied man in his sights.
The sharpshooter’s wife, truth be known,
is having an affair with a weaponless poet
and when the sharpshooter finds out
in week or two, as he certainly will,
creating, of course, another perilous situation
and another sad news story.
The poet, amazingly, it should be revealed,
wrote two anguished lines a year ago resembling
Darkness obscures everything
even my once luminous dreams—
such is sometimes the way of the world
and it is a small mystifying world, after all.
About the author:
Fiction writer, poet, and playwright J. J. Steinfeld lives on Prince Edward Island, where he is patiently waiting for Godot’s arrival and a phone call from Kafka. While waiting, he has published eighteen books, including Anton Chekhov Was Never in Charlottetown (Stories, Gaspereau Press), Would You Hide Me? (Stories, Gaspereau Press), Misshapenness (Poetry, Ekstasis Editions), Identity Dreams and Memory Sounds (Poetry, Ekstasis Editions), Madhouses in Heaven, Castles in Hell (Stories, Ekstasis Editions), An Unauthorized Biography of Being (Stories, Ekstasis Editions), and Absurdity, Woe Is Me, Glory Be (Poetry, Guernica Editions). Over fifty of his one-act plays and a handful of full-length plays have been performed in Canada and the United States, including the full-length plays The Franz Kafka Therapy Session, The Golden Age of Monsters, and A Television-Watching Artist, and the one-act plays Godot’s Leafless Tree, The Waiting Ends, A Question of Eternity, The Entrance-or-Not Barroom, The Word-Lover, Laugh for Sanity, Back to Back, More Than Money, Imaginative Drinking, In a Washroom of a Prestigious Art Gallery, A Play of Disbelief, and Memory Sounds.
Art: Marie Dashkova, Moscow, @melodyphoto
In the artist’s words:
My name is Marie Dashkova; I am 25, and I was born in Moscow, Russia. I currently live here. I started to be interested in photography at the age of 12 when I was studying photo-shop to create avatars and images for sites, so I decided to make selfies using old Sony video-camera that had photo options. I was inspired a lot; it became my hobby; now I could use not only images from the internet and photos by different artists, but I could also create something by myself.