It’s somehow tomorrow, and the two paths diverged have not yet splintered entirely into sawdust in this serpentine wood called America, whose politico blusters retort is rough and gullible, and you do not have to be good but better than good if you want to walk among the shining like shook foil rather than slip in crushed oil of dismantled freedom, bony with the grit of misinformation, like patients etherized upon stars & stripes that still can flow freely as purple waves of grain in the breeze—

if we all learn 
to sing like Springsteen 
and Joan Baez 

the very voices that wake us, 
the voices that save us 

will be our own 

—Short-listed Finalist in MacQ’s Cheribun Challenge #3

Lana Hechtman Ayers

shepherded over 150 volumes of poetry into print in her role as managing editor of three small presses. The Autobiography of Rain (Fernwood Press, 2024) is her most recent collection, and she has poems appearing in The London Reader, ONE ART, Peregrine, Rattle, and others. She is a former coffee-obsessed New Yorker whose favorite color is the swirl of Van Gogh’s The Starry Night. From her home in Oregon on clear, quiet nights she can hear the Pacific ocean whispering to the moon.

Author’s website: https://LanaAyers.com