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Amazon Description

Cracks of Light: Pandemic Poetry & Fiction 2019-2022 offers a diverse collection of personal and objective verse and prose that reflect upon bleak backdrop of the recentCOVID-19 pandemic and the people affected, including loved ones, strangers, first responders, and those who never lost sight of cracks of light.

Excerpts

Gris-Gris: Post Virus

Although many COVID-19 victims had become mortally ill and died, the rest of us trudged on with renewed appreciation of beauty’s mutable nature. Peter Beagle wrote that he’d slept with Lyla for a month before discovering she was a werewolf. Well Peter and Lyla’s fictional romance has nothing on me.

One night at Kelsey’s Bar in New Orleans, I met Marnie—a sweet anorexic-looking blonde thing with dull blue eyes, manicured nails, and bloodless lips. Our relationship began the moment after I introduced myself, and she issued an odd warning.

“I think I should tell you something,” she purred. “I’m a Zombie.”

Admittedly, under the right light, Marnie did have a somewhat ghoulish appearance. However, as a former hard-core goth, I could see past society’s mainstream definition for beauty and need for artifice. Then she addressed me again, this time with a deep, throaty voice.

“Didn’t you hear me? I said I AM a Zombie!”

Looking down at her empty glass, I replied, “Not yet—but you’re getting there! Let me buy you another drink.” She nodded agreeably, and then, somewhat transfixed, I watched the bartender mix a concoction containing four types of rum and three kinds of fruit juice. All the while, Marnie secreted rarified pheromones arousing my sexual awareness as never before. Additionally, her lustful stare pierced my guarded persona, leaving me with an exhilarating sense of vulnerability.

After downing five or six cocktails, Marnie ceased talking about her Zombie pedigree, and suggested that we split, allegedly to meet her parents. Oddly, from the moment she strode outside the bar, she began to dip and sway like the dancers on Michael Jackson’s Thriller music video. As we walked along, more and more contorted bodies crawled out of side streets and alleyways—all of them gliding forward, slinking step by step, weaving side to side.

As we moved along, Marnie noticed another bar and suggested a nightcap.  Needing little coaxing, I let her pull my arm in any direction she wanted en route to Tina’s Twisted Tavern.

“Those actually weren’t my parents,” she confided, glancing towards the door, moving her index finger in circles around the lip of her glass. 

“I had my doubts, Marnie.”

“Well, they’re family—of sorts….”

“Sure…. Hey, how ’bout we finish up here and kick it at my place tonight?”

“All right,” she coyly answered. Then, as I gazed into Marnie’s milky blue eyes, I realized that she seemed hungry for something. 

Yet, I can personally testify, Marnie didn’t desire human flesh. She assured me that collecting my fingernail clippings and chewing on them merely took the edge off painful withdrawal symptoms directly related to former bad eating habits. 

On the other hand, Marnie made no bones about being a connoisseur of fleshy pleasures; she claimed sex made her existence worthwhile—and occasionally brought blood to her lips. That fateful night, after I got past her front tooth falling out while kissing, we made passionate love until dawn. Once or twice, in between sighs, I could swear I heard her faint heart beat like timpani drums (atypical of the undead)!

Some rituals are hard to quickly abandon. Thus, even though we’d managed to get beyond our “social distancing” mind set, both of us headed to the shower after sex. Therein, we washed each other’s bodies, spending 20 seconds soaping all parts—faces, arms, necks, breasts, backs, arms, legs, and privates—instinctively singing “Happy Birthday” twice, much to our sleepless neighbors’ chagrin.

Now I’m not certain where Marnie disappeared to the next morning—or any of the mornings after spending the night with me. Nonetheless, by early evening, I’d find her at Kelsey’s Bar, nursing her drinks, waiting for me to take her home.  Initially, I grew suspicious, thinking she found another man to fulfill her daylight sexual appetite. Afraid to directly ask where she went every day, I followed her one morning, but, despite superb sleuthing skills, I only caught her visiting a health spa. 

“What are you doing here?” she asked me as I burst in on her body treatment.

“Looking for you, Marnie, wondering why you’d be intimate with me at night and then leave me come daylight.”

“You know that I’ve got bad skin,” she noted, “so I do salt glows and body wraps—as well as facials—to revitalize my appearance daily—especially so close to the Mardi Gras.”

 “Really? Does this place do your nails for you, too?” I laughed, making light of an embarrassing situation—noticing apparent liver spots on the back of her palms.

“Yes, dear,” she snapped sarcastically, “So give me some space; I’ll see you later at Kelsey’s.” Then she winked, “Someday I’ll bring you along for a little aromatherapy—or an exfoliating experience.” Looking at her hands, she quickly added, “Purell damaged my skin; guess I crossed the line practicing excessive hygiene during my self-imposed quarantine!” Clearly, I misjudged Marine’s philanthropic temperament; she didn’t have a cheating gene in her body.

Believe me, Hollywood’s demonization of zombies does them a great injustice. In the following days, Marnie and I mixed with those moon-walking street strutters—the slinky individuals she once called family members. I actually looked forward to them buying me drinks, tipping glasses, and toasting Marnie—who they referred to as my ghoul friend. Some might say disparate life forms have been kind to us. Soulmates since marching with the dead on Fat Tuesday, Marnie and I’ve been an item for over two weeks!

Meanwhile, I’ve learned not to judge her peculiar habits. In fact, I now share Marnie’s fingernail obsession, often chewing and savoring her cinnamon flavored clippings from dusk until dawn! During that time, our wildest sexual fantasies have become mere foreplay to the real thing. Granted, relationships are rarely perfect and at best, unconventional. Peter’s ladylove’s a werewolf, and I’ve hooked up with a zombie! Kinky? Hell yeah! Nonetheless, unlike most lonely coronavirus pandemic survivors—habitually entrenched in social distancing—neither Peter nor I sleep alone at night!

Aegis

“Sometimes you have to burn yourself to the ground 
before you can rise like a phoenix from the ashes.”
 – Jens Lekman (Swedish Musician)

When spotted leaves cling to branches
& muddy shallows bake as riverbeds dry,
we’ll yearn for apocalyptic freedom—
delivery from decimation’s barren womb—
await honesty’s action over deceitful
complacency sans solution where
each calculated risk breeds compromise.

Rise from the ashes, be my phoenix,
create beginnings from dying embers,
dance in enchanted forests, play
puckish pranks or seek changelings
as the answer to dysfunctional family dynamics
& pandemics; beyond crumbling ruins,
stone walls stand battered by time
like a merciless blitzkrieg, children 
hazard wagers against one another,
toss dice amid rubble, stake lives
on street craps, roll six-sided cubes 
like oracle bones divining fortunes.

May our gambles pass like cloudbursts—
fleeting cells sprinkling & cooling hot asphalt,
evaporating in heat, leveling uptight bodies 
& clearing minds; under temperate skies
kindling renewal, we will tread paths 
where flames flicker & our combustion
sparks haloed lives outliving nine ravens.

© Sterling Warner

Praise for Cracks of Light: A Review by Rose Anna Higashi

Gunilla’s Garden, Sterling Warner’s eleventh volume of poetry, will stun you with its breathtaking variety of people, places, emotional ups and downs, fast-paced imagery and variety of literary forms, from free verse to sonnet to cadralor and Fibonacci. Warner’s tireless creativity, inspired by his years as a professor of World Mythology and Literature, draws the reader into an intense poetic journey that melds the simple beauty of star viewing with the complexity of the ancient world of myth and mystery. Grounded in his upbringing in San Jose California and his move to the Hood Canal area of coastal Washington, Warner’s intense attention to visual and auditory detail invites the reader to join him in his daily adventures, both simple and profound.
 
Generous in his use of similes as well as allusions, from Zeus himself to Buddha, St. Francis of Assisi and Lady Macbeth, but never a literary snob, Warner revels in remembering the El Rancho Drive-In of his youth, wading in the mud of Purdy Creek and poking around in his grandmother’s cedar chest. His readers will feel that they have been somewhere specific in time and space, met someone real, experienced an era in human history or embarked on a mythic journey filled with gods and goddesses whose names and purposes still matter.
Interestingly, fourteen of the poems in Gunilla’s Garden are about specific women, Grace, Kiera, Selena, Carrie and others, each artfully described to reveal each woman’s unique character and aura:
 
Dana styled her hair
Like a stellar jay’s
Feather crest—pointed
Royal, elegant, bold;…
Dana’s self-discovery thrived
Under firefly luminescence.
 
With never a hint of judgment or condescension, Warner as a poet is a friend to women, and the last woman, discussed in several poems in the final section of Gunilla’s Gardn, is Warner’s wife, Carole. Here we meet her as the love of his life and the hidden unifying archetype for this entire volume of poetry. We come to know this remarkable woman before her engagement to Sterling, during their forty years together in a tiny rental house in San Jose, her illness after their move to the beautiful Washington coastline, and her death after an extended time in a coma. The final poems open the door to the reader to share Warner’s journey of grief. In “Owning My Apocalypse,” influenced by Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Warner concludes:
 
Loyal to my nightmare, alone, I perpetually relive
My personal Ragnarök, every time I
Awake without Carole, my love, beside me.
“The horror! The Horror!”
With his readers beside him, Sterling is not alone. 
(Review submitted by Sterling Warner)

Paperback

Author Biography

Author of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry, Sterling Warner has several publications. His recent ones include: Visions Across the Americas (8^th edition © 2013), and Anthology of World Literature [Until the 17^th Century] (6^th edition © 2017). 

Warner’s poetry and fiction have appeared in many international literary magazines, journals, and anthologies such as Verse Virtual, Anti-Heroin Chic, The Ekphrastic Review, Poetry Life and Times, The Fib Review, and MasticadoresUSA.

Warner also has written several volumes of poetry. His most recent ones include Flytraps: Poems (Independent Press © 2022), Cracks of Light: Pandemic Poems & Fiction 2019-2022 (Annas Bay Books 2022), Halcyon Days: Collected Fibonacci (Annas Bay Books © 2023), Abraxas: Poems (Kelsay Books © 2024), Gunilla’s Garden (Annas Bay Books © 2025)—as well as Masques: Flash Fiction &. Short Stories (Independent Press © 2020). 

A Jim Herndon Award recipient (2013), a Pushcart Award nominee (2014, 2020, 2021), and a Hayward Award winner (2000), Warner was named the Atherton Poet Laureate in 2014. Warner formerly taught in the English Department at Evergreen Valley College, where he served as the Creative Writing Program Director, EVC Author’s Series Organizer, and Leaf by Leaf literary magazine Chief Editor.