Gary Charles Wilkens



MIRROR BALL


When a man responds
to a woman’s beauty
a door in him squeaks
open. Beyond it a mirror
ball flings beams
to caress her cheekbones.
She is invited in by bag --
piping clowns hitting
wrong notes, juggling bears,
a frog singing “Hello my
honey, hello my baby,
hello my ragtime gal!”
and the tatter of thousands
of typewriters. The air
is warm and salty. If and when
she smiles the ball supernovas.






Gary Wilkens was born in 1976 in Charleston, SC and raised in North Carolina and Arkansas. He currently pursues a PhD in Creative Writing at the Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi. His first book, the Red Light Was My Mind, was released in 2007. His poems have also appeared in the Texas Review, Passages North, Yellow Medicine Review, and The Prague Revue.







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