Ice Breaker


It leaves like a cured disease– the zero of everything,
March tearing it straight away like a whip wind.
March peels its winter scabs and slaps roseate skin,
beats with that angry midwestern rain flair
like a spur digs into the most monstrous horse.
Spring screams its reign, strangles the creek ice 
till it buckles and folds, clogging first flows.
Spring eats the dead skin of gravel roads, trees,
the over dead cemeteries, and spits green feyish
abominations on shrub, bark and boulder.
The crackling season is not a promise, not a pledge.
It is frail finitude, for with the full fresh spread
will come the scalding bounce of summer, the rotted 
dip of fall, and winter– that failure of remission.

Wings Of Wax


Out of my hibernal fat sloth my eyes thaw–
months unable to well up warmly from put-downs
at work, homophobic utterances from blue-collars,
winnowed work ethics, I can now come out
and cry with relaxed shoulder muscles and a jaw
that does not grind in a kind of depressed surrender.
My red beard held me, hid my face too boyish,
but now it's barren and pale like gladdest anemia,
so I smile, cough out those three common colds
that gripped when snow was hardest.  OCD ticks
that accumulated in the dark now melt– the vehement 
repetitions and tinnitus crackling choirs.  I know 
pain is ahead in those dreading day pulses– sober sun 
pain.  Love pain.  But I'll fly high, avid as Icarus.

Why Does Snow Look Blue In Waning Light?


You are a blue frost rose, blue like the deep cobalt
glaciers that calve and diminish down the waterways,
as you too cripple and trickle and splash into
nowhere.  You sprang on Christmas eve beneath
the green and red LED’s of the bird-nested roof
of a house that raised 5 children at 401 Main St.
No one knows what germinated you, what birthed
you like rock candy accumulates on a string in 
sugar water.  Blizzard imp.  Crystalline fist.  Your
roots beg for the permafrost, brittle immortality,
but April has its agenda, it's sweet scythe for you.
As you join the blood-warm things but then seep
beneath the conquering grass, curl your DNA like
a fetus till some roaming fecundity sparks you anew.

Marc Darnell is an online tutor and lead custodian in Omaha NE.  He received his MFA in creative writing from the University of Iowa, and has published poems in The Lyric, Rue Scribe, Verse, Skidrow Penthouse, Shot Glass Journal, and elsewhere. His latest books are Forecast: Increasing Visibility  (Kelsay Books 2024) and The Mining Muse (Impspired Books 2024).  He has 3 times been awarded an Academy of American Poets prize.  His book of poetry, Remnants Of Reason, is forthcoming from Kelsay Books.