Jéanpaul Ferro is a novelist, short fiction author, and poet from Providence, Rhode Island. His work has been featured in Review Americana, Identity Theory, Dogmatika, Cortland Review, Hawaii Review, The Rose & Thorn Literary Review and others. His poetry has been featured on WBAR radio in NYC and he is a 4-time Pushcart Prize nominee.

Another night in ruins

Another night in ruins,
all the ghosts going up and down the Spanish Steps,

a bomb goes off in Trafalgar Square, a bigger bomb goes off somewhere else;

there is a blue sunset with five suns setting in the sky, the Indian Ocean on fire, all those red starfishes washing up on shore to hear us scream;

there is a Dominican girl in a blue dress whose husband plays guitar,

He is burning on fire at her feet,
her mother, father, brother, ten cousins, and six sets of uncles and aunts have disappeared,

their empty clothes go jumping about,
a smile on a mouth going one way, a little memory on the shard of mirror going another,

notes in the air looking for a stone to land on, looking for something that might last forever, maybe a window, maybe a day, maybe a night, a bed where we used to lie, a lovely song, a redwood growing toward the sky;

instead, there is a pile of coffin nails, a ripened man lying there, the dark seeds of of our blackest night:

blue jeans, Donald Trump’s hair,
jazz on the Mississippi, a credit card
buying martinis in Key West,

the ashen lines of the corn fields in September,

but it is all gone now.