Five Poems
by Sammy Bellin
March 9, 2026
The city in spring like a cask of ale, allowed to breathe
after months swaying in the cargo hold.
Everyone’s out.
Joggers and strollers negotiate uneven sidewalks
while the cyclists, lords in their neon finery,
fizz by unopposed on the clogging walkways.
Ants are praying again, reforming their inch high ziggurats.
I donate my pain au chocalat crumbs for their eucharist.
Crocus shyly crack the surface. Stung by my sight,
they wilt into crabgrass before I can snap my photograph.
Next year they’ll bless me. This year the winter cries
she cries with me. There will be money another day.
My currency is coffee and the beauty of the city and this youth.
They only let you spend it once.
Like a Lighthouse, This Feeling is Unquenchable.
Friday morning. A wall fenestrated.
Gray light seeps off the swirling clouds
bathing my applications in the cold glooms
of false spring. Guardsmen daffodils
protect the dogwood hesitantly,
there’s never enough money to die for work.
Would they rather marry?
I know that I would. My eyes scrape against
hyacinths huddled under the Y’s crumbling steps,
shivering ferociously. It’s too warm in here,
I have half a mind to leave the half-drunk coffee behind
and let the chill engulf me like a doomed early bloomer,
crumbling into the moss-swallowed earth.
I dream of rebirth,
a heaven crowded with gnarled roots and warm peat.
Returning for Roadkill
The stomach of the dead buck
is swollen around its twisted neck, intruding;
an early Bacon sketch, its viewership eager
and appalled. The tortured carcass barely remains—
an oil drum half melted, a partial find
in the black-gum pits of La Brea.
The butcher, back for bits, bites his fat tongue,
too afraid to cry out. Curdled in asphalt hell
among the prostrate squirrel and genuflecting fox,
will you scalp his antlers
like a court jester sawing the clefted points off a crown?
You dealt death then flinched, frozen stiff, driving far
to clear your addled mind, until
the allure of barroom fame fucks you feverish,
and frenzied you free the horns from sticky maggots sucking flesh like air.
Coward, nailbiter licking blood from your dented chassis,
you are less than the crow, who watches
your chrome-plated deathblow with worm-breath and avarice.
Frozen Leaves Trapped Beneath the River’s Ice
Indecent shapes struggle under the force of non-movement:
mollusk-like leaves cluster in stasis, chained
to their icy void like Sampson shorn bald,
his glistening pate reflecting the spout of his deep pain.
I want to release them. I kick a frozen rock loose from its grip
and let it drop. A stingray of trapped air
glaucoma white is birthed from the failed breakage,
its flat body scuffling and scratching, desperate to escape
the mottled forms of once vibrant life, now shackled
in perpetual decrepitude. Quickly,
the bubble quiets, and slows
like a committed patient quitting their thrashing,
studying the dense fog as it unblurs and takes form.
The leaves stay, accompanied by a jagged keyhole for shallow breathing.
They are the only ones who have not complained.
Splintered cracks ease themselves atop the surface like fluting
carved into a Corinthian column.
The air is still. A thaw will come, and free
these hostages, allowing them death’s peace
away from me, away from prying hands.
Prometheus as a Featherweight Boxer
staggered the ineluctable with a sweeping hook—
others call her Fate, and pronounce the snips
of cloth the past, and foggy goggles might argue
their lives over these fluttering chords but the boxer
brain-battered and featherweight keeps shifting
his fleet stance and swinging and
bonecrunch birthing blood like the Acheron flowing through
the Underworld’s labyrinth of stalactites and fields of pain—
bloodied and swimming in stars he shakes
his crown of dewy hair, sweat globules like diamonds and
Clotho begs him to take the hint and swagger back
to his shrinking corner but cross-eyed nods are a sharp
no! guts roiling from the motion of a sucker punch,
elbow down knee down fist down fist up head down
look! his pleasing stumble, his swollen eyes of clotted blood
are a roaring flame in the cold and empty night.
Someone frightened in a cave is smiling. Somewhere
on a lonely eyrie an eagle dreams of a fountain of ichor.
BIO: Sammy Bellin lives in Lewisburg, PA. His poetry appears in Rust & Moth, wildscape. literary journal, January House Literary Journal, Delicate Emissions, and Spare Parts Lit. You can find him on Instagram @sammyabellin.