Pale Dancers

by J. Mark Hauer


The wind sighs a long, intimate
breath across gapped teeth
as pale relics rise beneath
a mad drummer's moon.

Frost-fire kindles
the slumbering silver-blue
lawn:

The troupe assembles,
rearticulates, each for
wry diversion --

They dance whisper-soft
to the carapace music of
a cricket leg drawn through
the whiskers of a mouse.



J. Mark Hauer has made a career of living beneath his potential and when self-disgust lashes him until he weeps, he lifts his quill with results that are all-too-often depraved. He lives simply – upon the largess of his friends and coworkers. He also tells us that he has some sort of addiction to wedding corsages.

When he is not begging for money or deflowering members of the bridal train, Hauer lives a modest life in Huntsville, AL. He holds a BA in Anthropology, a major he asserts is just as entertaining as English, but without "the stigma of English Professor Personality Disorder," or EPD, sullying the study with megalomaniacal assertions of "the story really means."

Back to the Table of Contents.