F. Daniel Rzicznek
Turncoat
The bony vines
around the lungs
sprout sharp arms,
blood looming
sick as an eye,
the dusky liver
mutely alive
and still treading
the huge waves
of the body, still
waiting to hiss,
like a flute
left in an open
windless place,
its low rebuke
of years, ages.
F. Daniel Rzicznek’s Cloud Tablets, a chapbook of prose poems, was a winner in the Wick Poetry Center Chapbook Competition and will be appear this year from Kent State University Press. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the Iowa Review, Boston Review, Carolina Quarterly, Sou’wester, Notre Dame Review, and elsewhere. Currently he teaches English compostion at Bowling Green State University.