RC deWinter writes in several genres with a focus on poetry. She’s also a digital artist and sometimes chanteuse. Her only claim to fame is a small but devoted Twitter following. Her only soda is bicarbonate of.
RC deWinter’s poetry is widely anthologized, notably in New York City Haiku (NY Times, 2/2017), Now We Heal: An Anthology of Hope (Wellworth Publishing, 12/2020) in print: 2River, Event, Gargoyle Magazine, the minnesota review, Night Picnic Journal, Plainsongs, Prairie Schooner, Southword, The Ogham Stone, Twelve Mile Review, York Literary Review among many others and appears in numerous online literary journals. She is also a winner of the 2021 Connecticut Shakespeare Festival Sonnet Contest, with anthology publication forthcoming.
RC deWINTER
NATURE’S CHARMS
nerves stretched to breaking i sat in the fading light of an almost rainy day
medicating myself with the blood of fermented corn
but even with a third of the bottle gone i twitched and shivered
in the grip of anxiety so far beyond freefloating it approached tornadic
not knowing what else to do i fled to the wooded field upstreet
thinking the green embrace of nature might calm me
but found only sphagnumed stone and a network of abandoned tunnels
foxes? moles? i couldn’t tell and was way beyond caring
no wildflowers bloomed in the ragged meadow salted with amanita
and by the trunk of a pitch pine i found a patchwork of small bones
scattered in a jigsaw of death then a sudden flurry and i jumped nearly falling
face first into the puzzle of bones as a murder of crows blackened the sky
their feathers swirled down on me like a black cloud from the pit
as i tasted the acrid sweat of their pimpled skin and feeling like a prisoner
in one of poe’s more florid nightmares stumbled back to the road to make
my drunken way home back to the safety of four dead walls and the bottle