Here's to Smoke in Your Eye, by F.J. Bergmann

Winter in Hell, by Kelli Hoppmann (USA), 2007. Click image to visit artist site.

​Here’s to Smoke in Your Eye

The veilfall of snowy petals is itself like pale fumes
that never rise—falling, always falling. Occasionally,
accumulated drifts quiver, snowlike, over the ground.
Your soul follows fast on her silence-shod hooves.

One eye is your demon eye. You can’t see the forest
for the light. Reddening at your own visions, you look
only toward what you don’t want. A trickle of cherry-
ripe blood moistens your mouth, its hidden teeth.

Alcohol is a folding fan you keep closed and hidden
until the winds die. Sometimes you blow your own
pink conch shell to summon sirens, the empyrean
energizing with the gyre of your personal storm.

You are sure that forget-me-not skies will still be
waiting beyond the clouds when you are ready to shine.

F.J. Bergmann

F.J. Bergmann edits poetry for Star*Line, the journal of the Science Fiction Poetry Association (sfpoetry.com) and Mobius: the Journal of Social Change (mobiusmagazine.com), and imagines tragedies on or near exoplanets. A Catalogue of the Further Suns, winner of the Gold Line Press chapbook contest, will appear in 2017.