GEORGE CASSIDY PAYNE - POEMS

George Cassidy Payne is a poet and social worker from Rochester, New York (U.S.). His work has been featured in the Hazmat Review, MORIA Poetry Journal, Chronogram Magazine, Ampersand Literary Review, The Mindful Word, The Angle, Mojave Heart Review, Red Porch Review, Up the River, and many others. George’s blogs, essays and letters to the editor have appeared in the USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, the Havana Times, the South China Morning Post, The Buffalo News, and more. He is the proud father of two beautiful children and works full time as a domestic violence and residential family counselor in Rochester.

Mother's Milk ​

​From bibs to bigots, 
how does it happen?
 
A love like a restaurant
in Sologne in the Orleanais,
 
and those nights when the 
body had no brain-back
 
when the first 100 words
tasted ancient like mother's milk.

​Deep Time

​Deep time clinging 
to cliffs. As elemental
as paper and spoon.

Laughing, spinning, 
it's just escaping on 
the run-just molecules
packed like prisoners-

just portions skinned side
down the sweet songs of 
our crazy sorrows. 

Deep time is sweet orange 
blossom water; it is a fluid 
that cannot be named. 

​We Crashed Into the Myth

​We crashed into the myth. 
Melted away, we swallowed
all of the atoms with our fingers. 

We crashed on a sheet of black
ice. Without wasting a second,
her maple burgundy locks bled out.

We crashed on MLK Day, in the
sprinkle of a January rain, the sky
turned olive skinned and chocolate. 

We crashed. We crashed. We crashed.

​Ruthless Immortality

​Covered in a bright burst of 
December snowfall, the sun
struck diamonds smile back. 
 
The scent of vanilla essence and
Jim Beam whiskey bristling in the air.
 
Each day is a day of endless breaths
whisked away together in the infinite
setting of golden custard set stars,
 
like the last remaining virgin pine,
you give me ruthless immortality. 

​Even a Fool Can Make It

​Not even light can 
escape the baleful
vacuum of a chilled
apricot. No radiation
breakfast; no saucepan
wisdom; no ready to serve
senators in the dark. 

Just fruit and rind-that's Eden.

And when she heard
even a fool can make it, 
that's when she took the bite.

​Tied Loosely Into a Knot

​In front of a child,
the father in you will 
surely die. Yet the center
comes out clean. A dark
matter in your eyes.

Yes,  the holy is a tree stump,
or better yet, it is two rogue 
planets ejected from their 
birthplaces. Neither created 
or destroyed, an unborn memory

pressing through the ends, on to
the edge, tied loosely into a knot.