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. 

Kika Dorsey

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