Brett Gordon Poetry.

“’Air’s love language is touch’, Brett Gordon writes in The Art of Shapeshifting, a beautiful collection of poems in which land and air burst into a kaleidoscope of reckonings. As nectarine moons glaze, as a daughter buries a mother, so too does a speaker yearn for places she has never touched, will never touch again: Nectarine moons, Bolivian salt flats, Castelo peacocks bickering in Portugal’s trees. ‘Be like water’, she implores her reader as we dovetail between life and death, redeye flights...

Rare Act of Violence- pg. 10

I spy my love

along the ridge,

a silhouette

in shadows of black.

I stand with my heart

a breakin’

‘fore I fear

he’s not coming back.

We were to be married

this autumn

but the war broke out

in June.

With brothers at odds

in the fighting,

I fear this is no

Civil tune.

Visions of blood, tears

and sorrow,

I fear he isn’t

so well.

I pray for the wake

of tomorrow,

and for my love,

I cast a spell.

I summon the thing

that shall not be named.

He appeared as a

“Really Loud and Partially Deaf”

dedicated to my Husband, Army Veteran Mark Batton

My wife brings up

a basket of laundry.

She doesn’t say anything.

She doesn’t need to.

I know she despises folding laundry.

It’s a load of towels.

I grab one.

Warm and fresh-smelling.

I fold it in half,

then fold again,

the way it fits best

under the cabinet.

I’m driving the Humvee.

We’re on patrol in

the village. Alert, I eyeball

suspect sand.

It’s probably nothing,

but it could al