A sudden canyon
by Lauren Suchenski
but i never do
have to lose you,
isn’t that right?
as every rock lingers in your name, every strange stone face heralds your voice, every fragment of fragments fingers along your forestry – you, angel pulpit; you, profit of my lifetime; you, mountain of chunked ash and debris still carrying me; you, current of river-wide ocean smiles; you, hurricane of frenzy, of yellow-brick-road hair, of condemnation of the nation you narrated me through; you, of bending arrows pointing towards a future splintered across the time-beaten mountains (now hills, now prairies, now basins dried of water long rained and gashed upon the silt); you, silk of my sanity, surrender of my serendipity, curtain of love laced around the ancient sunrise still rising; still rising, i still rise for you; still waiting, i still wait for you; some lover smashed in time, particle-d in relativity, part-of-me in relative motion around your orbit, part of the sea still chasing our muddy heels – trying to wash clean the reverie. part of my sleep still a waking dream; part of my day still a walking sleep; part of the dreamtime wrapped around my torso like a corset, tying me together with the strings and quarks of quaking time; circus rhymes and mangoes and limes; all the times we timed ourselves tracing the universe from my path to your path, and back again. and the moment the paths parted – like a rift on the landscape, a sudden canyon – an archeological arched back – a rotating cuff of surface gruff – a tilled tile of tectonic plate grooved out of place – a pothole in the desert – a leap too steep to meet // and time – tearing towards like a catapult, forgetting your name, forgetting our path, peeling roads away like dunes, like anthills craned away from their foundation. how does the feeling of our never touched future still feel like a path under my feet that i cannot walk? is it buried deep, my songline smothered? or is it vanished, like a penciled blueprint laughing?
a path nevertheless – deep in the canyon banks, eroded and corroded and –
oh, there you are again – the rocks, the trees, the everythingbreeze, the sound of the sound of the echo of the songline still singing // the path towards the path disappearing and reappearing like a dream, like a joke, like a penciled blueprint laughing
oh, there you are – right in front of me – the curled sunlight streaming – the never-ending race between my dream, yours, and the one we’re all waking from
About the Author:
Lauren Suchenski has a difficult relationship with punctuation and currently lives in Yardley, PA. She has been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize as well as twice for The Best of the Net and her chapbook “Full of Ears and Eyes Am I” is available from Finishing Line Press. You can find more of her writing on Instagram @lauren_suchenski or on Twitter @laurensuchenski.
About Weekly Flash Prose and Prose Poetry:
CutBank Online features one work of flash prose or prose poetry every Monday. Submissions are free and open year-round. Send us your best work of 750 words or less at https://cutbank.submittable.com/submit.