KN Magazine: Poetry
NIGHTPLANTER
A laborer pauses in a pine grove, struggling against weakness while continuing the quiet, necessary work of cutting stalks so they may grow again. In “Nightplanter,” Al Baron reflects on unseen labor, endurance, and the tension between personal memory and the anonymous work history requires.
FRANKLIN, ALONE?
In “Franklin, Alone?” John Grey crafts a haunting meditation on identity, memory, and isolation. Through surreal imagery—frost that deceives, an owl singing backward, and a hare leaving no trace—the poem explores the fragile line between reality and forgetting. As the speaker questions whether the name “Franklin” belongs to him or merely to the room around him, the poem drifts into a quiet psychological mystery about the erosion of self.
Butterflies
In “Butterflies,” Holly Day twists beauty and decay into a startling meditation on death. Imagining a world where brilliant moths and jewel-toned butterflies emerge from human corpses, this provocative poem challenges our revulsion toward mortality and asks whether transformation would change the way we grieve. Lyrical, unsettling, and philosophical, it confronts the thin boundary between horror and wonder.
BARHOPPING
In “Barhopping,” Al Baron traces a restless night through numbered bars, blurred memories, and unresolved ghosts. What begins as casual drinking becomes an uneasy reckoning with the past—old wounds, shared trauma, and the illusion of escape. Sharp, surreal, and darkly reflective, this poem explores guilt, repetition, and the way entrances and exits can feel equally impossible.
THE DIMMER GLOW
A twilight meditation where landscape, memory, and unease converge. “The Dimmer Glow” moves through dusk and darkness, blurring the line between what is seen and what is remembered, as the mind turns inward and finds meaning not in brilliance, but in the quiet pull of fading light.
Calvin Stowe Stands Thwarted By The Door Of Harriet’s Writing Room, 1851
A vivid, intimate portrait of Calvin Stowe standing outside Harriet’s writing room, caught between faith, desire, resentment, and reverence, as spiritual devotion and historical contradiction collide in a charged domestic moment.
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.
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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