Unresolved, dissonant notes echo in my head—once again the dead world is walking/raving inside of me. A murdered bride in her wedding gown winks at me, while her tuxedoed groom swings a blade-tipped walking stick around my head. Why aren’t you here too?
Even later, a swaying dead elm branch creaks loudly above our house—an arm of possibility ready to pummel me. Come back—only at night can we see that our ship is adrift in the oceanic universe—how we are all being ferried down an inescapable maelstrom.
Mario Duarte is a Mexican American writer and a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His poems and short stories have appeared in Aaduna, Abstract Elephant, American Writers Review, Digging Through the Fat, Emerald City, Native Skin, New Croton Review, Pank, Plainsongs, Red Ogre Review, Rigorous, and Zone 3.
