KN Magazine: Poetry
Old Faithful
A tender meditation on devotion, aging, and the quiet vigil of love, Old Faithful captures the midnight hours shared between a person and a beloved dog nearing the end of life. Through intimate imagery and restrained grief, the poem honors loyalty, caretaking, and the ache of staying awake with someone you cannot bear to leave alone.
Concerning Love
In spare, meditative lines, Concerning Love explores silence, memory, and tenderness as acts of listening. This poem reflects on what remains unspoken, suggesting that love endures not through declaration, but through the quiet depths that bind the anguished heart.
exploring the heart with clinical precision
A visceral, intimate poem that uses medical imagery and anatomy to explore vulnerability, trust, love, and the delicate work of healing emotional wounds without leaving scars.
Waffen und Sachertorte aus Wien, 1986
A moment of accidental violence unfolds in a Viennese café, where a dropped pistol skitters across marble floors amid coffee cups, cake, and quiet panic. This poem captures the uneasy collision of elegance and threat, history and etiquette, where a single object transforms civility into suspended dread.
Dust to Dust: Milepost 466
A haunting desert drive becomes a collision of memory, myth, and terror as a lone traveler confronts the revenants of her past and something far darker lurking on Route 264. A poem of place, dread, and the thin veil between the living and what listens in the night.
Light and Shadow
A lyrical poem exploring the contrast and connection between two wounded souls, whose wings—light and shadow—mirror their shared histories of hurt, healing, and longing. A meditation on love, grief, and the way two people can become each other’s dawn and dusk.
Haunts of the Past
A brief, haunting meditation on memory, regret, and the echoes of a past that refuses to let go—an intimate struggle between remembrance and resilience.
Rapeseed
In Rapeseed, Olivia Pierce Graham reflects on memory, voice, and self-interrogation through lyrical precision and haunting restraint. The poem’s quiet intensity explores how identity and sincerity shift across time—what remains, what disappears, and what still speaks back from the page.
Wounded, The Morning
In Wounded, The Morning, poet Clark Hays captures the fragile beauty and quiet brutality of dawn in an urban landscape. Through imagery of shattered glass and blooming flowers, Hays contrasts destruction and renewal, revealing how even a city shaped like a broken heart can glow with light, resilience, and rebirth.
MORE THAN YOU BARGAINED FOR
In More Than You Bargained For, John Grey transforms the classic haunted house into a chilling sonnet of gothic humor and macabre beauty. Ghosts, nuns, barons, and murdered minions all inhabit this centuries-old mansion, where the true price of ownership is far more than anyone could have imagined. A sharp, rhythmic reminder that in real estate—and in life—location isn’t everything.
AVOID THE TREES
In Avoid the Trees, Al Baron delivers a striking poem of observation and memory. Through eucalyptus trees, smoke, and the weight of aftermath, the poem confronts both imagination and reality—reminding us it’s sometimes safer to turn away than to face what remains.
YOU’RE JUST A PHOTOGRAPH AFTER ALL
In You’re Just a Photograph After All by John Grey, a haunting image comes alive in memory. The poem explores grief, intimacy, and the unsettling persistence of presence after death.
Her songs
In Her Songs, Nepalese poet Bhuwan Thapaliya offers a luminous tribute to the enduring power of ancestral music and its ability to echo across mountains, time, and silence. As a woman sings beneath the moonlit sky, the universe leans in—revealing how songs of love and peace may be the world’s most vital inheritance.
Timeless Butterfly
In Timeless Butterfly, Gary Ramsey reflects on aging, memory, and enduring beauty through the quiet admiration of a woman transformed by time. With lyrical grace, the poem celebrates resilience, wisdom, and the unseen radiance that persists beneath life’s surface.
Paper Birds
In Paper Birds, Claudia Wysocky delivers a powerful meditation on freedom, fragility, and the pursuit of dreams. Soaring with rich imagery and emotional depth, the poem explores what it means to chase transcendence in a world bound by gravity, time, and impermanence.
TURNIPS IN SOUTHERN TENNESSEE STILL
In Turnips in Southern Tennessee Still, poet Michael Lee Johnson weaves imagery of moonshine, memory, and spiritual doubt into a haunting meditation on the Southern landscape. With echoes of violence, history, and surreal reflection, this poem explores the blurry lines between faith, myth, and rural truth.
TRAUMA: SEE MEDICAL FOOTNOTE
A ruptured relationship leaves behind more than emotional bruises in TRAUMA: SEE MEDICAL FOOTNOTE. Cary B. Ziter’s visceral poem fuses medical metaphor and emotional wreckage in a raw, surreal meditation on heartbreak, memory, and the lingering heat of a love turned catastrophic.
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