‘A Game of Chess at Midnight’, ‘Poem’ & ‘Blind Date’

Heather Holland Wheaton is a writer, photographer, actor and tour guide. She’s the author of the short story collection, You Are Here and her work can also be found in Shooter Literary Magazine , Press Pause Press, Red Noise Collective, Slipstream, The Morning News and Every Day Fiction. She lives in Manhattan and will never leave.

A Game of Chess at Midnight

They are so much like the dead, 

The chess pieces plucked, one by one, 

From their squares and set

Along the edges of the board.

From the shade of an opponent’s hand 

They watch the match play on.

They witness their deaths in others. 

Like bare, meat-picked knucklebones

The white pawns glisten beneath 

An electric flame. First to fall, 

They are toys for the proud 

To flaunt with swivels,

Or gyre together between 

A few cruel fingers.

I have seen a marble bishop 

Roll off a table and shatter 

Into fragments finer than dust.

I have glued a crest back onto

A wooden horse then checked 

A king in a three-prong fork.

The moves of the dead are recalled

By those alive in the field,

Those who have become the frontline.

In the end, each graveyard is plowed,

Limbs are reattached to torsos, torsos 

To heads. Arranged in rank order, 

A coin taken off an eye is flipped

For white or black.

Poem

After the late night 

thunderstorm 

observe: 

at dawn 

the backyard 

thick with raindoves 

and squirrels

foraging, 

side by side, 

for nuts 

wind-

shaken

from the branches above.

Consider: 

how quickly 

they all scatter 

when the house cat 

leaps loose 

from the sunroom.

Blind Date

she left 

so soon 

i was not 

able to 

tell her,

over 

California 

rolls,

the price 

of eggs 

in China.

Chase Harker is a poet from New Bern, North Carolina. He is currently a student in the MFA program at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. His work has previously appeared in Flying South, BarBar, In Parentheses, and elsewhere.