Heaven’s infinity must surely contain
teardrops and the finitude of dried leaves,
of autumn’s exhausted sigh
in its vaulted cathedral.
I imagine my mother in that heaven
crocheting the rhythm that blankets my mind
when I pull the sheets over my nakedness,
where I cluck that rhythm with my tongue,
rap my hand on my thigh,
the staccato beat like predictable sidewalk cracks,
my mother slithering through them,
my father in a field of lavender counting pills
and swallowing the exact right dose,
me skydiving in a vast expanse of blue
over fields promising a harvest,
where gravity is an acrobat
plunging me upwards
into a crack in the sky,
my back released from the burden
of flimsy sails that are supposed to save me,
released from that crescendo
where all we can see on the horizon
is the fall,
that crack I see between a swath of grassland
and the open sky,
even though its breach we never could step on
even if we tried to,
as it recedes like sirens
into the night.
is a poet and fiction writer in Boulder, Colorado, and lives with her two children,
husband, and pets. Her books include the chapbook Beside Herself (Flutter
Press, 2010) and three full-length collections: two from Word Tech Editions,
Rust (2016) and Coming Up for Air (2018), and one from Pinyon
Publishing,
Occupied:
Vienna is a Broken Man and Daughter of Hunger (2020), the latter of which won
the Colorado Authors’ League Award for best poetry collection. Her poems
have been published in Freshwater, KYSO Flash, The Columbia Review, The Comstock
Review, The Denver Quarterly, The Pennsylvania Literary Journal, and numerous
other journals and books. Her writing has been nominated five times for the Pushcart
Prize.
An instructor of English at Front Range Community College, Ms. Dorsey also works
as a writing coach, editor, tutor, and ghostwriter. In her free time, she swims miles
in pools and runs and hikes in the open space of Colorado’s mountains and
plains.
Author’s website: http://kikadorsey.com
