Howard Winn has had poetry and fiction published by The Southern Humanities Review, The Antigonish Review, The Stand Magazine, The Hiram Poetry Review, The Xavier Review, The Evansville Review,. Galway Review (Ireland), New Verse News, Dalhousie Review, Descant (Canada), Taj Mahal Review (India), Cactus Heart, Crack the Spine, Main Street Rag, Caduceus, Burning Word, Pennsylvania Literary Journal. Southern Humanities Review, Cutting Edgz, Chaffin Journal, and The Broad River Review. His B. A. is from Vassar College, his M.A. in Creative Writing from Stanford University. His doctoral work was done at N. Y. U. He has been a psychiatric social worker in California where he also taught for three years and currently is a faculty member of SUNY as Professor of English.

METAMORPHOSIS

It is late September and
the Gold Finches are no
longer gold but are wearing
their winter drab as if they
were merely Pine Siskins
or some other nearly
anonymous little brown bird
for the Spring and Summer
feathered flash of sunlight
is hidden in the modest
brown of Autumn and Winter
as we wait as if for the emergence
of Persephone from the darkness
of the underworld where she
is bound by the shackles of myth
as we are enchained by faith
that has no force of fact and
denies the reason of the mind
and does not see the beauty
of the physical world come to life
in the Summer glory of the Gold Finch

INCOMPLETE

It could be something in the air
or perhaps in the water
that attacks the will to
finish
and it may be contagious
for there it will
be another
incomplete house
in the midst of the
streets of ordinary abodes
the raised ranches
the split level domiciles
many with those
moveable basketball hoops
and backboards that
symbolize family and permanence
at least through adolescence
there will be that one orphan
still garbed in its black
tar paper underwear
days without end
from fear of finality
waiting for the final fitting
dress of suburban Maine
to become just
one more
middle class home
like its neighbors

INVENTION

I was working on a poem,
trying this and that to see
what went together to say
what I wanted to say when
I discovered that I had already
written that poem before
and so I stopped without
trying to finish this one.
Do not bore with repetition.