I wake before the sun spills 
its apology over your side of the bed. 
The dream of you still warm 
but already receding, 
like a photograph 
left out in the light. 

When I love, it’s not softly. 
My heart builds altars, 
tall as cathedrals, 
and sometimes they tremble 
with the weight of what we carry. 
And even cathedrals 
can be emptied 
with a whisper of fire. 

Last night, I felt the heat rise—
not passion, but fury, 
that brief incineration 
that makes me peel you back 
from the core of me. 
That fast unraveling 
where I loosen you 
to keep from losing myself. 

This is how I survive: 
I let you slip into outline, 
render you in grayscale, 
until I can look again 
without flinching. 
I make you two-dimensional, 
a study in charcoal and restraint. 
It’s not revenge. It’s retreat. 

Not everyone returns from this. 
Some stay pressed in albums, 
their color draining like dusk from sky—
still lovely, but distant, 
a kind of ghost that doesn’t haunt 
so much as remind. 

Rick Christiansen

is a former corporate executive, stand-up comedian, actor, and director. He is the author of two full-length books published by Spartan Press: Not a Hero (2025) and Bone Fragments (2024). Of the latter, Missouri’s first Poet Laureate, Walter Bargen, says: “Christiansen conducts a brilliant, heartfelt and painful excavation of his life. If readers only read one book of poetry this year, it should be Bone Fragments.”

Rick’s prose and poems have appeared in numerous venues, including As It Ought to Be, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Oddball Magazine, The Rye Whiskey Review, Sheila-Na-Gig, Stone Poetry Quarterly, and Trailer Park Quarterly, among others.

He is co-editor of The Dead Pets Poetry Anthology (Transcendent Zero Press, 2023), an advisory board member of The Writer’s Place in Kansas City, and a member of The St. Louis Writers Guild. He lives in Missouri with his wife, Kim, and their dog “B.”

Author’s website: https://rickchristiansen.com

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ “Not a Hero” by Rick Christiansen, a reading and short film by Alan Johnson (9 July 2021)

⚡ “Kites Without String” by Rick Christiansen and read by Alan Johnson, SpoFest Open Mic Poetry (3 November 2022)

As the poet wrote on Facebook in June 2025: “Alan Johnson, the British composer and filmmaker, made this lovely short film of my poem ‘Kites without String.’ We lost Alan last year. But his beautiful work lives on because he released it into the world before he was released from our world. Please watch and think about what you create.”

⚡ Always Something with Water, tanka sequence by Christiansen in Masticadores: Taiwan (19 August 2025)

⚡ Poetry Spotlight: Rick Christiansen and Bone Fragments in Flapper Press Poetry Cafe (10 October 2024; updated 22 January 2025); includes the piece “Hands” and the poet’s commentary

⚡ A Review of Bone Fragments by Rick Christiansen by Maria Nazos in North American Review (14 December 2024)

⚡ 85 Syllables for Spring, haiku sequence by Christiansen in Oddball Magazine (12 June 2023)

⚡ Baby Teeth, prose poem in MacQueen’s Quinterly (Issue 14, August 2022); nominated for Best Small Fictions

⚡ Into the Can, haibun in MacQueen’s Quinterly (Issue 11, January 2022); nominated for the Red Moon Anthologies and for The Touchstone Awards for Individual Haibun