Greg Larson- Two Poems

Greg Larson is a second-year MFA candidate in Creative Writing-Nonfiction at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia. He is a nonfiction editor for The Barely South Review, and his work has appeared in Proximity Magazine, Ruminate Magazine, Switchback, and others.

Black Raven

You were once an angel, descended from another world.

I loved you back like a brother loves his sister.


You were a beautiful otherworldly creature.

Now, you are a raven.


Your bubbling blood boils like lava


spewing from Plutonian shore.


The potion in your veins has fermented to poison,

pecking at the once-genuine love you provided as


light to any person or room.


Now it vacuums every poor creature who enters


your black hole abyss from any molecule of brightness.

You are unlove.

You can try to paint or buy a pretty face and outfit


but it all amounts to


lipstick on your beak.

Stale Perfume

The sun cuts me awake.


I lean over, hug her for the first time in what feels like forever.

She’s sweaty from her hot sleep—
I taste her.

We step into the shower—

heat clouding the bathroom,

vision fogged—


and softly touch.

Wet shampoo drips from velvet snakes

slithering down her back.
They smell like a hot summer garden

before a storm.

She smiles—


lips red like cherry

reach slowly to mine.

Her giggling mouth

slips through me.

As we step out the air cuts between us.

We embrace, laughing,


but it’s not quite enough


to save us from the cold.

As she dresses, I’m surprised with


dry forced kisses between articles of clothing


robotically preparing for the day.


She embraces me, and she smells


like sweet perfume, so lightly all over her—


just a tease of a taste of a whiff of the sweetest flower I can

ever imagine.


Why is it so thick in my memory?

She doesn’t wear the perfume anymore,


I only catch it stale on her clothes—


hot viscous poison quietly running through Us Now

and Us Then,


like blood in my mouth.