Brian Patrick Heston | Sing, Dark Times

Sing, Dark Times by Brian Patrick Heston. Number 29 in our Keystone Chapbook Series, selected by series editors Karen J. Weyant and Jerry Wemple.

[ cover image courtesy of Patty Paine’s Wrecked Archive ]

Publication:  December 19, 2025 [100 copies]
29 pages
ISBN 978-1-960693-32-7
$ 12.00

Brian Patrick Heston grew up in a poor working class section of Philadelphia. His chapbook, Latchkey Kids, is available from Finishing Line Press, and his full-length collection, If You Find Yourself, won the Main Street Rag Poetry Book Prize and is available from Main Street Rag Publishing. His poems have won awards from the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Foundation and the Robinson Jeffers Tor House Foundation, and have been shortlisted for the Vice-Chancellor’s Poetry Prize. They have appeared in such publications as the Southern Review, Witness, Prairie Schooner, North American Review, Missouri Review Online, Hotel Amerika, Tusculum Review, and Ghost Fishing, an anthology of eco-poetry published by the University of Georgia Press. Currently, he teaches literature and creative writing classes at Truman State University.

Man in Flower

The man lies in the tall grass by the old railroad yard.
No one walks this way anymore, it’s sun-filled
and moon-stilled. Trains haven’t run here since
before the bicentennial. Weedy trees rise up around
the man—a jungle, or barley waiting for the farmer’s

scythe. A white flower shoots through his head,
blossoming from the pit where his left eye was—
man with flower—manflower. Above him, in an ash’s
ratty leaves, starlings warble from a noisy nest. Each day,
they speckle him. Seeds also gather, stubby sprouts

rising from his thin jacket, his faded jeans, the loose
flesh of his face. His body will be safe for a while.
But once covered in grass, in the heaviness of daisies,
everything the man remains will shrink, flatten out,
until all that’s left is a field where no one goes. 

[ thanks to North American Review for first publishing this poem ]
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