← v14n1, Spring 2015
Poetry · Volume 14, Number 1

Heaven

Given the chance to finally sleep, we dethrone it.

So much kneeling, so much singing and too little

of it, in order to rouse again into some blotto glare

where blood seems to have, remained living,

the heart in a paper bag with trust and a rose thorn,

the luggage of memory tied to our skinny wrists,

fuming on sentiment, all of those gravities

that dragged us, at times, by the hair, the tongue,

at least somewhere, like doubt, now touchable,

shaped, however we dreamed them to be, joy:

a sparrow, but not the kind I knew that could fall—

swimming in a silver lake without temperature,

breathing in an air with no weather sewn through,

and the pain, my eldest anchor yet, gone, shutting

my eyes only if I’m allowed to.