THE ENEMY RESTS IN THE SHADE
but when I leave / what will I be remembered for / I counted my blessings like rainfall / I stood, mouth open, pointed toward the heavens / the truth is not everything clings to lips like honey from our home country / time builds holes in memory like an eager gun / yes, builds / like an immunity; like the hope to unremember; like the tension of understanding that to heal is to find what first caused the pain and lean into it like the shade of a willow tree on a Midwest July evening / say: weep; say: bone; say: utility; say, when the body says sleep it means wait / these rules and their consequences / a slow parade on an endless stretch of road / our becoming is no tree in the distance / but a mirage of clearwater / the end to thirst is always more fulfilling in thought than in practice / we find kinship in toil / and are a child to our nostalgia / come, affixed to your intimacy / everything is soft when seen at a distance / and everything is out of reach / even you, your slowbreathing, and its prairies rising and falling with a noon-wind / if there ever was an end / it’s there / in the clearsunned palm of a quiet war / know that when I was asked to brave / I recalled myself the enemy / and lost
William Bortz (he/him) is a flawed husband, poet, and editor from Des Moines, IA. His book of poems THE GRIEF WE’RE GIVEN will be published this winter through Central Avenue. He has poems in Empty Mirror, Okay Donkey, Kissing Dynamite, and some others—but more importantly, he absolutely believes the Heat will win it all this year.