Waking Alone on the Trail by Dylan Debelis

You think you recognize the scene as teenagers drinking gin from a Gatorade bottle
but they are praying I think, in their own way, for their brothers to return from war.

These are the faces we make when our worlds cave in:
big faces sure that we are dying,
small faces pacing, pacing

tubular, centrifugal, hung over
where the soul-points converge with symmetry.

All that rain spontaneously frozen. Maybe
those wishes did go somewhere to be listened to. Maybe
the curation of our division glues some mangled truth together
that knows your name by the thread of a heart
that dangles and splashes blood into the desolate
sky.

If you are listening to me, please respond
by moving your right foot. Do not touch the art
lightly. Instead, rub your naked chest against the statues
and feel the brush strokes with your spine.

Let me know
that there are still horizons worth erasing.

Dylan D. Debelis, a founding editor of Pelorus Press, is a publisher, poet, performer, chaplain, and minister based out of New York City. Dylan has work published or forthcoming in more than twenty literary magazines, including The Buddhist Poetry Review, [TAB] Literary Review, and Carbon Culture Review. His first full-length book of poetry, Our Graveyard Shift, is forthcoming through Spring Otter Press.

Other things you might want to read:

Strawberry by Mehrnoosh Torbatnejad America the Beautiful by Kendra Tanacea Oft-aloft by Terrell Jamal Terry MBTA Bus Poems by Liam Day