2 Poems by John McKernan

Self Portrait as Sperm Chalk on Blacktop

There I am     In black
& white

My thin skull     The letter O
The number zero
A circle of infinity

Trailing
My tail coils
White serpent
Black whip

Even after I crawled
Inside the yellow egg
Without any shell
The links of chain
Kept flogging     Flogging my newer self

Bioinfo

John McKernan – who grew up in Omaha Nebraska – recently retired after teaching a long time at Marshall University. He lives now in Florida. His most recent book is a selected poems Resurrection of the Dust. He has published poems in The Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review, The New Yorker, Virginia Quarterly Review and many other magazines