Poetry by William Varner

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The Meeting Chair Asks if Anyone Wants to Share on The Daily Reflection About Rock Bottom 


One spoke of how she was nicknamed Homicide

One of hospital seafoam green and breathing tubes

One of an ivy-colored suicide vest in jail

One of forgetting to pick his mother up for dialysis for the third time

One of begging in underpasses with cardboard signs

One of a strangled cat on the lawn

One of the shattering bay windows he threw his daughter through

One of the endless shakings of her brother’s head

One of selling her body on a stained mattress in a tent

One of jumping out of his mother’s car window on the way to rehab,

telling the people who first reached him on the highway

that this time for sure he’d quit.





The Meeting Chair Asks for a Moment of Silence to Pray to Our Higher Power


make me 
an upwelling      
in the Atlantic,

the force 
of a humpback’s 
breath.

make me 
the left hand 
of wind, 

brushing Enso circles
into clouds.

make me 
slants of light
through stained glass,

landing on 
dustless oak pews.

make me,
a star chart 
in a Neolithic cave,

the round swirling
of dust and gas

torn from Earth
to become 
the moon.

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William Varner’s poems have been published in Cimarron Review, The Cincinnati Review, Green Mountains Review, Harpur Palate, New Ohio Review, Poet Lore, Pinch Journal, Vallum, and elsewhere. He’s been a finalist for the Erskine J. Prize from Smartish Pace and the Maine Literary Award. His chapbook, Leaving Erebus, won the Keystone Series Chapbook Award from Seven Kitchens Press.