ALCHEMY OF BECOMING WIND BACKWARDS | NICHOLAS ALTI
Within you, little wind-birds hollering
& an almanac of wide open hearts
Drink from these hands an endless dim river
It happened so long ago, you could throw
a stone at it—my hand slipping gently out of heaven’s
I haven’t breathed quiet songs, I exude heavy hymnals
My little hope to curl inside a hand, be held
like ashes, to scatter off a stone tower
into a sea of goat heads & millions of unhappy serpents
I promise I cry sunsets—
little ghost flower gone in a day
There are legends of a love to cure insomnia
like hellebores planted in corpses,
like alone, in old hands, an orchid
IF SEEING IS BELIEVING I NEED PROFESSIONAL HELP
In my head something screaming (maybe me) I hope it’s
me I can pray myself diminished & muddle the violence of it
So far/ like a pendulum/ from moment/ to moment/ I vanish/ / /
If I can promise you but one thing, in the end
you’ll find out that none of this was dreamed
This is the slowly growing distance between the heart & the skin
How what you’ve done defeats what you want
& what you took takes from you
From rural Michigan, Nicholas Alti is an optimistic depressive with trigeminal neuralgia, poor timing, an extensive criminal history, & a modest criminal record. Recent yowls have found homes at Yalobusha Review, Really System, Into the Void, The /temz/ Review, and Qwerty. He currently resides in Alabama.
Cover image by Zachary Schomburg: photos of walls in Merida, Yucatan, Mexico, an area that is very flat. The horizon lines on theses walls mimic that flat horizon line on its landscape.
