She’s meant to be western & bold, not fireworks shot down
from the stars, pinpricks freckling the horizon
in a heavenly zoetrope of the lush, beautiful people under her wings.
She lives in the heavens not knowing what else to do,
her land always drifting—a nation of barb boarders wanting to be crossed
despite the rules, & if she had horses, she’d ride
them like comets & think much of nothing, stirring the clouds
for progression, to contemplate the faces of men
staring up at her, wondering who’s really there, each man a teardrop
already fallen, grown into a life of sorrow, catastrophes—
soft illusions falling into the pit of her memories, radical fallen eagles
in an ailing kingdom sipping poison like cocktails
out of a holy grail with little corrupt umbrellas blooming in the news
as black masses of luck. She’s incapable of chanting ohm,
screaming ouch in the deepening obscure night, into the anti-enlightenment
of dark matter, sitting with her mouth shut, staring blankly
into nothing, a night sky looking for help, speechless,
& even when the heat gets turned up so high the internal avenues
of adversity boil & cleave the people’s hearts, unwanted eclipses blocking
progress, trapping & belittling those left caught in the webs of deceit
who keep close to her, grasping at her tail feathers, hoping for preservation,
tomorrow will be like today, an immediate yesterday to haunt
in a time of detachment, of vivid heather, affectionate evil, oral graves,
legalities of contempt, for what can be said of a folded-over constitution
propping up the legs of a broken bed inside their rooms,
a torn collection of words seldomly read?
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Ariana D. Den Bleyker is a Pittsburgh native currently residing in New York’s Hudson Valley where she is a wife and mother of two. When she’s not writing, she’s spending time with her family and every once in a while sleeps. She is the author of three collections, eighteen chapbooks, three crime novellas, a novelette, and an experimental memoir.
Photograph by Joshua Rawson-Harris.
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