by CS Crowe (September 2025)
Spalling
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I wouldn’t love you unless you were a worm.
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We must do at least this much to be worthy.
Plant native flora in our front yards.
Survey natural fault lines.
Practice geophagia.
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Do you remember when we were children,
We played in the sand until we tasted it,
Gritty, between our teeth, in our pockets;
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How quickly we become estranged to dirt.
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I want to say: I love you, but I have never
Even seen you try to touch a wildflower,
Only to realize it was a stinging nettle.
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I can’t kiss it better, if it never hurt.
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The black loam did not feel their tiny kisses
For 10,000 years after the Pleistocene ice age
Left all native species of worms extinct
Until we brought them over to the New World.
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Oh, little gardeners, our forests evolved
To live without you, and now, you expect them
To be grateful for your return?
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How have we never learned to love the soil
The same way we love stones?
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Even now, when we see the barrel full
Full of polished pebbles at the gift shop,
We yearn to put them under our tongues.
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We must do at least this much to be worthy.
Lay on the ground without a blanket.
Holds hands with a dying tree.
Kiss a worm.
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Broken Chore Wheel
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Oh, dirty washcloth on the shower floor,
I envy you because you have kissed her
Between her toes and her cheeks,
You have tasted her post-work stank.
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I never understood the strangers
Who threw themselves into their sheets
Without washing away the long day’s touch
Until she refused to make love to me
Before she’d taken her evening shower.
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I pick you up and ring you out by hand
Without complaint, because in this,
This ‘whose hair is that in the sink?’
Kind of love. We have no use for disgust.
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A Community Of Smooth Stones
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blue raspberry rock candy
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seaglass on northeastern shores
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a leather pouch of polished pebbles
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turquoise aquarium gravel
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stones at the bottom of the mountain river
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kindness rocks hidden in the park
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a circle around a campfire
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a full moon in the sky
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the earth beneath our feet
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V Is For Vampire
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Oh, romantic bloodletting. One bite and everything is stained gold.
I’m sorry to disappoint you, but this poem is about spring.
Ars Poetica on pollen. Or maybe, if you’re good, a villanelle?
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What I mean is, V is for Venal. I am greedy for your puffy eyes.
Your dripping sinuses. Your stuffy nose. You sick pervert.
You ask me to pick up tissues, and it’s not even a sex thing.
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It’s about the sibilance of saying: please and don’t stop
Finding a use for your lips, your tongue, your tonsils,
Loving the human body the same way we love pollen.
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What I mean is, V is for Vernal, spring has come,
And the trees are cumming on the roof of my car again:
Oh, seasonal non-consensual play. We meet her in a bar
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And we pretend we don’t know her name.
This is how we keep our hearts in one piece when spring
Doesn’t show on time. It’s secretly about the suspense.
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What I mean is, V is for Primaveral, the first day of spring,
We set the date on our calendars and say she is here.
Theoretical human holiday never to be observed.
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Have you ever skipped work to lie in a field of flowers?
Everyone’s going to the beach again. I want to see you
With nothing but petals to cover your nipples and your cunt.
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What I mean is, V is for Primeval. Primordial. Primadona.
Oh, dryad-dom of the meadow, she does whatever she wants.
She knows we’ll still celebrate the spring equinox without her.
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She texts us in the middle of the night, and we rush to her embrace,
Knowing we can only sleep in her arms after two shots of NyQuil.
She slips out of the sheets before we wake, and we wait for her to call.
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What I mean is, V is for Virginal. White. Clean. Pure. That’s a joke, btw,
No tree nor flower remains untouched by burning hydrocarbons.
Asphalt in our roads. Tar on our roofs. Gasoline in our lungs.
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The trees turn to ash in the sun. There is no more shade,
There is no more spring. Just you and I, kissing under a tree,
Light-headed not from lust but from an iron deficiency.
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What I mean is, V is for Verdant, the world around us, undead,
Which is to say, yes, spring comes, a day or week shorter each year,
But still, she will come in spite of us. We are here. We are gone.
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Humans forced by our vampire masters into open-air chattels,
Outside our cages, the flowers will bloom for the first time in centuries,
The honey bees will finally return, now with cute little fangs.
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Late to the Rapture
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It isn’t your fault, oh, amaranthine angel;
You oversleep the day Jesus is to return,
Stretch your wings. Preen your feathers.
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You are a clockwork dragon; you move
According to your binary, programmed
When God was still learning to code.
Hello World. The end times have come.
Or it will come, as soon as you clock in,
As soon as your Father is done with you.
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Late night at a jazz club in Hoboken, NJ.
An obsession with the syncopated,
And when an angel gets obsessed with us,
Well, we’ve seen how that can go wrong:
Something so beautiful God has no choice
But to destroy the world to give us a chance
To feel half that much passion in holy fire.
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With a click, you open the velvet case
To caress the brass curve of your trumpet.
Oil the valves. Grease the slides. Polish the bell.
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Like us, you do not understand perfection
It is your natural state of being.
Can a bruise be an imperfection if the violence
Comes at the hands of your Creator?
A thumbprint. A knuckle. In the soft, wet clay
Of your body, can we even see the difference?
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It happened like this: you came home late,
You overslept until it was nearly noon
On that sacred day of the Tribulation.
Your Father knocked on the door. Woke you.
Tears welled in your eyes for the first time
In your unlife; you knew in your heart,
You had done something wrong, something human.
This trill of your quintessence was called sin,
And this crack of your Father’s knuckles,
It was called punishment. Justice. Faith. Love.
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In the funhouse bronze of your trumpet,
You see your own face, oh, split lip seraphim.
Brush on concealer. Sponge on foundation.
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Hope we are too busy falling to our knees
To notice what your Father did to you,
Or is our seeing and fearing part of the plan?
I have to imagine it happens this way,
I have to imagine you sleeping soundly,
A bed, a pillow, among the clouds, or I will weep.
A lifetime of insomnia into a sleepless eternity.
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A Jehovah’s Witness knocked on my door;
He asked if I’ve heard the good news,
And I smiled, Yes, yes, I have heard.
I have heard when we die, we sleep
In our graves until the end times come.
The sky, peeled back like a scroll
With the sounding of a trumpet.
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Promise me, it’s true. I want to believe you.
I want to have faith that perfection can be gentle.
Oh, angel of the rapture. You missed a spot.
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CS Crowe is a poet and storyteller from the Southeastern United States, he believes stories and poems are about the journey, not the destination He loves those stories that wander in the wilderness for forty years before finding their way to the promised land.
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