Glorious Piner
Winter 2025 | Poetry
Three Poems
A Portrait of the Nude Maja
Arose from the ports, good-men do come alive. A good, amassed, sways all ways, always along the tide. And at moonrise, the good-men stagger from their gnomic enfolded wares on the pier, through the cave of the Purple Orchid to see you, my dear.
Fine strokes of clay revealed on the rock by fire; the mystery of your breasts more round by desire. Song of the dance makes men’s hearts churn. Vertere, my love – to turn, to turn. Land of men worked and beaten blurred as the pole, until the dollar is as beautiful as a rose.
A Portrait of a Bird III
From a feathered darkness stood the ichor colored flesh, erect. Crude & raw, flak of black hackles stuck in the folds – Ornithes Areioi, for god’s gold glory, took the Black Sea’s tufted mold, and with its crooked vulture’s bill, charged into the Amazon’s virgin crest, pervert – and what white quills faint on the scouring bird of darkness, covert.
A Portrait of Faces
Athena, Napoleon, Ulysses S. Grant: there is a copper murkiness about them. Stags beneath the Phanes of Halicarnassus.
Bands of gold bind the rings of the Great Dismal swamps. At twilight, the light searches on the surface and reveals nothing but light. And like nowhere else, in the middle dusk there’s dusk teeming in the water.
Where the moss hasn’t found its way, where there could have been reflection and desire, there are only shadows.
In the shadows, a hound sniffs along the freshwater bank; in the sky, a cast of flesh is freed into the night.
Forest steam or industrial smoke cloud the steep horizon slope.
Glorious Piner is a poet and editorial assistant for the Scoundrel Time literary magazine. She received her MFA in Poetry from the University of Maryland. As the owner of Acts of Praise: Poetry Bookshop, she devotes much of her time to building an expansive and comprehensive catalog designed to resource poets with the creative and critical texts needed to support and advance their writing practices. When not engaged in the bureaucratic work of stewarding the literary community, she sits by her window and waits for the poem to come.
Her works can be read in The American Poetry Review, The Florida Review, Conduit Magazine, in other journals, and in two anthologies: Plume Poetry 10 and Giovanni’s Room Bookstore’s Queerbook. For updates on events, publications, and other projects, visit her website: www.gloriouspiner.info.