Four Poems by Christopher Cadra

“At Sea”

On a cloud-thick night,

The stars refused him help.

At sea, with a small crew of foreign

Tongued and skill-less sailors,

He knew only that he was lost.

 

 “Another”

The night black, the rain cold,

and the lightning, so close,

allowed us to see something

beyond, some other thing,

but what we saw didn’t stay,

left us as the darkness

regained its blanket.

 

“Omission”

It very nearly broke,

But saved from the end,

A horseshoe in the air is beautiful.

And sometimes milkshakes are all

That’s needed to stave off

An anxiety attack. How can we

As a people broker peace

When those like that run wild?

True peace can only come

To individuals, not whole peoples,

I think, anyway, or so I think.

And maybe that’s a good thing,

I think that that’s a good thing.

 

“Maybe Zombies”

We watched a couple of old horror

films. She didn’t much care for them.

I liked one of them, anyway. We made a pot of coffee

at 2:30 am so that we could stay up and watch the dawn.

(Dawn of the Dead (1978) was the film we watched that I liked.)

A couple hours later, as we sat, looking out a window,

waiting for the sun, she rested against me and fell asleep.

I stayed up until light appeared. It was all the same to me.

I wondered if she was dreaming and what about.

Christopher Cadra is a writer and poet. He’s been published in The Cimarron Review, Danse Macabre, Dope Fiend Daily, Elephant, Rye Whiskey Review, Verse-Virtual, and elsewhere. His poems have been translated into Spanish and published in the Spanish journals Altazor (Chile) and Cardenal (Mexico). He’s published criticism in Basalt and a journal he edited, The Literati Quarterly. He’s currently a senior editor at Gleam, which focuses on a new form of poetry he helped create with collaborators.