Ron Czerwien

     Ron Czerwien is the used-book buyer at A Room of One's Own Bookstore in Madison, WI. He also sells books online as Avol's Books. His poems have appeared in Arbor Vitae, After Hours, Cannot Exist, Hummingbird: Magazine of the Small Poem, Rosebud, Wisconsin Trails Magazine, Wisconsin Academy Review, and online at Moria, nth position, Qarrstiluni, Right Hand Pointing, and Shampoo. Ron serves as treasurer on the board of the Council for Wisconsin Writers. He co-hosts the monthly “First Sunday” Open Mike Poetry Reading at The Fountain Restaurant & Bar.

Revival

One crow picks
At a knot of flesh and muscle,

Another in my neighbor’s hickory
Complains, complains, complains....

We forget to be astonished.

How else do you explain
Oak leaf shake and shimmer,

Tambourines and hallelujahs
In a late September gust,

Or the evening’s theme song:
A little rain, a little more...

Never the same, never the same.
Oh love, forget me often.

Published in Wisconsin Trails Magazine, October, 2005

• • • • •

Security Fetish
from Departures

Insomniac rain and my
hands up and down
the length of your
leaving, the order
of the black moon
gonging all around.

Is it blood weather
or the white, cottony
chasm of other days
you vanish into?
Checking and rechecking,
not much else to do.

Published in nth position, June 2008

• • • • •

While you sleep

the moon soaps your windows,

your mirror swallows twice
the normal dosage of light,

another unsolved theft
at the Museum of Snowman Fossils;

someone is thumbing
the pages of your diary, touching

a match to the fuse of your spine,
the stars lower their hooks.

Published in After Hours, Summer, 2006