An award-winning author, poet, and emeritus English Professor, Sterling Warner’s works have appeared many literary magazines, journals, and anthologies including Anti-Heroin Chic, The Galway Review, Lothlórien Poetry Journal, Ekphrastic Review, and Sparks of Calliope. Warner’s poetry/fiction include Rags and Feathers, Without Wheels, ShadowCat, Edges, Memento Mori: A Chapbook Redux, Serpent’s Tooth, Flytraps, Cracks of Light: Pandemic Poetry & Fiction 2019-2022, Halcyon Days: Collected Fibonacci, Abraxas: Poems (2024), and Masques: Flash Fiction & Short Stories. Presently, Warner writes, hosts/participates in “virtual” poetry readings, turns wood, and enjoys boating and fishing in Washington.

Road Trippin’

Fortified by Guinness stout
and a predilection for adventure
we relinquished mind-shackles
that formerly restrained
our free-spirited indulgence
in things unholy among people
of known vice and questionable virtue.

Curious, probing, at times
downright reckless, we shunned
cautionary cloaks of dubious
discretion and escaped mundane
routines, challenged beliefs
that had shaped our character,
examined the reasons taboos
applied to some while ignored
by those privileged, exalted road trippin’
epiphanies—the lifechanging equivalent
of an existential religious experience.

Gypsy days and Irish nights
we rolled in a Subaru station wagon
over blacktop hills, gliding in and out
of traffic changing lanes, shaking boxes
of Boston baked beans like tambourines,
listening to bluegrass and flamenco music,
returning to work renewed after our four-day quest.

Frozen Trajectories

Moon trails slide
up and down,
side to side along
silk spider webs
like abacus beads
on fixed translucent rods
counting quasars
predating solar exchequers
estimating distance
determining ratios
calculating possibilities
that evolve into pearls
or settle like lunar dust
protected by memory’s
metaphysical enclave
where enumerating happenstance
human interaction in space
remains secondary to assessing
the square root of passion
and visual moon trail satisfaction.

Nacre

Parting crescent lips, Brenda
flashed iridescent straight teeth
that shimmered like mother of pearl
dazzling customers she assisted
through self-checkout stands.

Friends, family & strangers trusted
Brenda’s smile that belied censure,
appealed to their personal desire
to foster independence, beholding
to no one or no thing—a stone’s
toss away from sanctimonious
beliefs & public service nestled
safely behind thoughts that lit up
rooms with new age excitement
& snuggled with images as familiar
as pile upon pile of dirty clothes.

From Safeway cashier to streetwise florist
Brenda fed habits & pursued reinvention;
ever reverent, sneaking into cemeteries
before dawn, she plucked Easter lilies
laid lovingly on graves, sprayed them
with glue tossing fistfuls of glitter
on their creamy blossoms, her youthful smile
transformed into a matronly grimace
devoid of life, defying death,
at odds with rebirth as she spread
“white robed apostles of hope”
across living room altars & kitchen tables.