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His one kidney failing my friend each night saw visions, unknown creatures, forms half human, ghosts, circle his bed as always tiny soldiers worked with tools inside the clock’s green face to take off the emerald hour and minute hand. Glowing still now they’ve fallen to the darkened floor. Nels Hanson has worked as a farmer, teacher and editor. His fiction received the James D. Phelan award from the San Francisco Foundation, and his poetry the Prospero Prize from Sharkpack Review.

‘Yo no creo en brujas, pero que las hay, las hay’ (Galicia’s cruel saying) There was a thief that a bad luck set him on the way to your house; a rapist that someone drove his madness’ eyes and his insane desire to that dear friend of yours, or, who knows, the weight of evil, even to your beloved daughter. A runaway truck that went around, didn’t catch you, but wrecked a car with your friend’s sister, also destroying her life and her family’s. An irate driver who picked you up in traffic, for, without any motive or reason, to overflow all his hatred towards this world we live in. That drug dealer who once saw at your son a certain hopelessness of youth and guided him, without pity or hesitation and with all wickedness, on the sordid path of addiction. That one you thought your friend but directed you, with false truths and promise of great gains, for a business he never had money or courage to. That stranger (maybe even a friend), who, hidden from you and from due respect, set eyes of malice and sin in your wife. That sullen and unpredictable man, let loose on the streets, instead of locked up in a bughouse, who can, on the outbreak of the moment, just take your life. So are some ways generated by witches you never knew, nor had never wished to know, who, for free and pleasure of wrongdoing, also for envy, collide daily with your brothers and sisters, and are always looking for you too. Edilson Afonso Ferreira, 80 years, is a Brazilian poet who writes in English rather than in Portuguese. Widely published in international literary journals, he began writing at age 67, after his retirement from a bank. Since then, he counts 190 poems published, in 300 different publications. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and his first Poetry Collection – Lonely Sailor – was launched in London in 2018. His second, Joie de Vivre, has been launched in April 2022. He is always updating his works at www.edilsonmeloferreira.com.

We make him dress up, hooded cloak, scythe and skull, the Grim Reaper, put a name to it sinister slapstick to cover the skeleton he is. Furtive footsteps, heard but not seen in the wooly uncertain night, in the darkened hospital ward, in your last agony; he's always eager for our passing to sate him, bate the restless life around him; his petty noise in your delirium, the ghost of sound, echoing against old men’s ears, against the baby's tiny shell of an ear, against the nightingale's sweet voice, captivating; all these and others competing for your last glimmer of attention on your way out. When he comes, when he comes, the soft schuss of a shot skier, making his lone descent. These sounds and your last movements, pure and simple as moonlight and the trees bending in the wind come together, foretell the end, one way or another peaceful, resigned, painful, brutal, in our midst, death, like clockwork, regular and familiar as the morning sun. Even in the last extreme hardly ever do we say "enough!" and mean it, grasping for one more day, one more blink of an eye, one more good green spring, we continue to hope, until cut to the quick, stopped cold, we hear his voice say come and away we go, leaving all we know behind, departing for whatever eternity holds of emptiness, of death, of nothing, of even less than nothing. Limitless, hidden beyond horizons the gape of the unknown; at the end of the road undisclosed forever what fate that fearsome spectre, voluminously berobed, that everlasting mystery holds for all of us in his bony emphatic hand. Jack D. Harvey’s poetry has appeared in Scrivener, The Comstock Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Typishly Literary Magazine, The Antioch Review, The Piedmont Poetry Journal and elsewhere. The author has been a Pushcart nominee and over the years has been published in a few anthologies. The author has been writing poetry since he was sixteen and lives in a small town near Albany, New York. He is retired from doing whatever he was doing before he retired.

7th-Circle Pyrite is a fledgling journal whose first round of publication is slated for November 18, 2023. If you are a writer or artist who is interested in having your work appear in our journal, we encourage you to visit our "Submissions" page for submission guidelines. If you are a reader who enjoys content detailing the themes our journal supports, be sure to check back soon!