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| Issue 27: | March 2025 |
| Poem: | 98 words |
By Lana Hechtman Ayers
Rainbow Sky Over Your Headstone
with your thousand colors— brother, your puddle-dark oil-slick wit diffracts into broken wavelengths, and you become elemental, ROYGBIV cloud-cast, pure lens of water, atom by atom as Whitman knew for every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you, forgiveness an oath unfurling from my stormy tongue pinned to the skin of earth, my sins against you settle into layers, into loam, into bones of your bones, i carry your heart (i carry it in my heart)* this love a bow composed of light and the arrow of a lone raindrop.
*Publisher’s Notes:
“For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you” is from “Song of Myself” in Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman (final “Death-Bed” edition, 1892); full text of poem is available at Poetry Foundation.
“i carry your heart (i carry it in my heart)” is the final line from a poem by E.E. Cummings in Complete Poems: 1904-1962 (Liveright Publishing Corporation, 1991); full text is available at Poetry Foundation.
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