Gone Lawn
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Gone Lawn 39
Winter Solstice, 2020

New Works

Richard Weaver

The Museum of Lost Memories


remains open, swings wide its richly paneled mahogany doors. A sideways bow to your presence, the gifts you have bequeathed. An open invitation into flickering darkness. The stone floor swallows the stutter of your footsteps. There's no reason to fear the elastic silence. The blinking eyes of pigeons, the few thoughts that have held and lead you here, insisting they alone are the true path, steadying you. Somehow absorbing the moisture of your palms. Offering comfort when none embraces. Holding you until your eyes reveal and heart slows, the path ahead waiting. Unasked, if offered, your toll banished. Your toil lightened. A one-way ticket to anywhere-but-here appears. Hovering. Your name printed. Glowing gold. At what price you wondered? What remains to give? What remains unlost? What sin unanswered? Flesh free of scars, self-inflicted or medical artwork. Hair of ghost. Teeth imposters. Home at last after a dusty-free absence of years upon years, you've returned to settle in for what little remains, the moon's silver weavings, a spider's imaginary web. As the dust settles around you once more, its appetite a constant in the glowing dark where wax saints stand stiffly, shoulder to shoulder with serial killers.


Richard Weaver lives in Baltimore where he volunteers with the Maryland Book Bank, the Baltimore Book Festival, and is the poet-in-residence at the James Joyce Pub. 100 of his Prose poems have appeared since 2016 in After the pause, Algebra of owls, Burningword Lit Jrnl, Clockwise Cat, Concho River Review, Crack the Spine, decomP, Five 2 One, Hollins Critic, Juxtaprose Literary Journal, Kestrel, Loch Raven Review, Mad Swirl, Magnolia Review, Misfit Magazine, Modern Poetry Quarterly Review, Mudfish, Mush/Mum Magazine, New Orleans Review, Oddville Press, OffCourse, OxMag, Pilcrow & Dagger, Poetry Quarterly, Quiddity, Spank the carp, Steel House Review, The Helix, The Opiate, Two Cities Review & Unbroken Journal. He is the author of "The Stars undone" (Duende Press, 1992), and provided the libretto for a symphony, "Of Sea and Stars," 2005, performed 4 times to date by the Birmingham Symphony.