1. Peace

No peace for me tonight.
I’m caught beneath
the long slow walk
of stars above
these days in which I wait.

2. Fog

In beach cities, fog
is a prayer for blindness
answered
with an even silence
the ocean’s seething cannot rough.

3. Clarity

Crystallized like milky quartz
or six years’ worth of immanence
in thought
I recognize
serenity is froth.

4. Splitting

Skin cracks on fingers
I’m afraid they’ll grow
up my arms
all over me
and I will fall into a puzzle.

5. Calm

Motionless
as dead skin
the sea turns
the sky’s deeper
gray.

***

(Artwork by Mary Grinyer, Monoprint, entitled “Splitting”)

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Selected byRaymond Huffman
Image credit:Mary Grinyer; A Monoprint, entitled "Splitting"
Mark Grinyer
Mark Grinyer

Mark Grinyer has published poetry in print and on-line literary magazines across the U. S. and overseas. His poems have been published in The Main Street Rag, Rattle, The Kansas Quarterly, The Literary Review, The Spoon River Quarterly, The Pacific Review, Perigee, Cordite, Writers Resist, Crosswinds Poetry Journal, Irises: The University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor’s International Poetry Prize annual, and elsewhere. A chapbook, Approaching Poetry, was published in 2017 by Finishing Line Press.

Born into a military family in the early days of the Cold War, Mark Grinyer spent most of his childhood and youth following his father, an Air Force officer, to many different stations in the United States and overseas. He went to college at the University of California, Riverside, where he began writing and publishing poetry.  After being drafted into the Army in 1969, he returned to the university, and received a PhD in English and American Literature. He developed a particular interest in the roles of poetry and poets in modern society, and in the use of scientific and natural scenes or images as vehicles for understanding our place in the modern world. He spent the next 25 years working as a technical editor and proposal specialist in industry and as a Lecturer at California State University in Fullerton. After retiring, he continued with his poetry and renewed his attempts to publish it in literary journals and books. He is currently writing and living on the edge of the Cleveland National Forest in Southern California.