“Peacemaker” by Gary D. Rhodes

My arm of fire…low and mournful….

The wheel goes round;
cold carbon heats.

My arm of fire,
my piece of peace,
low and mournful.

The barrel 
is not empty.

Until it is.

Gary D. Rhodes, Ph.D., poet and Associate Professor of Film and Mass Media at the University of Central Florida, Orlando, is the author (with William M. [Bill] Kaffenberger) of Becoming Dracula – Vol. 1 (BearManor Media, 2021), Consuming Images: Film Art and the American Television Commercial (coauthored with Robert Singer, Edinburgh UP, 2020), Emerald Illusions: The Irish in Early American Cinema (IAP, 2012), The Perils of Moviegoing in America (Bloomsbury, 2012), and The Birth of the American Horror Film (Edinburgh UP, 2018), as well as the editor of such anthologies as The Films of Joseph H. Lewis (Wayne State UP, 2012), and The Films of Budd Boetticher (Edinburgh UP, 2017). Rhodes is also the writer-director of such documentary films as Lugosi: Hollywood’s Dracula (1997) and Banned in Oklahoma (2004).