[Click] Photo: Natalie Anderson Darren Anderson has two chapbooks published (Seasons, Hidden Among the Pine), and has been published in over twenty-five print magazines/ezines, three anthologies, newspapers, and journals including recently published pieces in The Canadian Bulletin of Medical History, and The Ballarat History Journal ( Australia). He's currently working on a chapbook manuscript called Shakespeare's Garden, and a full length manuscript based on Martin Allerdale Grainger's book Woodsmen of the West. The first poem of that series will be published in The Ballarat Review.

Monday's Poem © Darren Anderson Hermit's Chess Citrus light drips from a carob tree onto his coconut hair, sun dried cheeks. Seasoned eyes focus on his minimal world of bishops and knights. On apple-green grass, he waits for a cornucopia of brilliance to enter his prune plum brain. Some say he's a sour grape content to play alone. He regards himself as vintage, an acquired taste. This mahogany board is Eden's orchard, a world where King and Queen rule devoid of bitterness, and pawns are as important as the royal fruit. All decisions lie in raisoned fingers, every sacrifice, self-centered. Victory is his nectar. It makes perfect sense to juice himself.