michael vaughn
Betwixt
Michael J. Vaughn is the author of thirteen novels,
including The Popcorn Girl, available on Amazon Kindle. His poetry has
appeared in Confrontation, Iodine and Caveat Lector, and he contributes
regularly to Writer's Digest magazine. He lives in San Jose, California,
where he works as an opera critic and plays drums for the San Francisco rock
band Exit Wonderland.
Diametric of a cardiac broomhead,
no lettuce in this, no rutabaga,
no osteothrombosis. Sometimes,
I wonder why we bother.
Jared walks the streets with a
spool of yellow string,
playing his life like a kite:
dentist, pawnshop, chowder hall,
cobbler. At the end of the
day, he retraces his route,
winding it all back.
Candace smiles,
stripe of snow in a ruby sandwich.
Jared, you marvel of a man.
Passersby freeze at the inequality,
this blatant mismatch,
tennis shoe, designer pumps,
insult to good sense.
But they have no idea.
Deep in a grumble,
Jared scuffled the sands of
San Gregorio, following the
flight of a raven spied
Candace in a kaftan the
salmon of eastern
clouds at sunset.
A single loose thread,
trailing all the way down the cliff.
He ran to the base and
pulled, and pulled and pulled,
till she stood atop the
bread-dough bluff a
naked Aphrodite, holding the
last of the thread in her fist,
a capillary of fierce intent.
She scratched her number in
the hollow of a clamshell,
tied the thread to a
hole in the edge and
flung it over.