Featured Poet Barry North

Barry North

Featured Poet Barry North

Barry W. North is a seventy-five-year-old retired refrigeration mechanic. He lives with his wife, Diane in Hahnville, Louisiana. Since his retirement in 2007, he has been nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize, won the 2010 A. E. Coppard Prize for Fiction, Honorable Mention in the 2011 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Awards, was a finalist in the 2014 Lascaux Poetry Awards, a semi-finalist in the 2014 Palettes & Quills chapbook contest, a finalist in the 2017 Eggtooth Editions Chapbook Contest, and a finalist in the 2017 Atlantis Awards. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Paterson Literary Review, Slipstream, Amoskeag, Sixfold, Serving House Journal, The Dos Passos Review, Tidal Basin Review, Vine Leaves Literary Journal, Dovetales, Hawaii Pacific Review, Freshwater, Gravel Literary Journal, Hospital Drive Anthology, and others. His published chapbooks are Along the Highway, Terminally Human, and In the Maze. For more information please visit his website.

The Night Before

my heart surgery
I treated myself to a hot bath,
after months of in-and-out showers,
amidst a busy life.
The bath was soothing,
but the reason for it
came into the room with me,
and wouldn’t leave.
I thought of my father,
on the day of his surgery,
calling my brother and me in to tell us
how much he had enjoyed us as children.
I lay in the warm water
trying to absorb the fact that
my time had come so soon, thinking,
surely, there must be some mistake.
The years were not supposed
to run off of me
like rain off a pitched roof.
Why, only yesterday,
I was making my first communion
at St. Anthony of Padua church,
worrying about being struck by lightning
if I let the wafer hit my teeth.
My mother, my father, and my brother
were all there watching me.

I swallowed it whole,
and was spared.

Sins of Omission

Bless me Father,
for I have sinned.
It has been a lifetime
since my last confession.
Today, I slept
through another sunrise.
That makes 24000,
give or take a few hundred,
by my own rough count.
And yesterday,
as I am sure You know,
I took for granted, once more,
an absolutely spectacular sunset.
I barely noticed
the palette of
unique and soulful colors
night squeezed out of day
as it slowly enveloped it.
You must have been shaking
Your Head in disappointment
as you watched me guide
a hunk of metal on wheels
along an open road at breakneck speed,
as though that were the miracle,
instead of the fact that I am here,
in this mystical and poetic place,
where everything,
even love,
had a name before I got here,
and all I had to do
was learn to speak the language.