BROWSE Columns
✕
o child, all the chances that you have
to cull these smooth, white days
are fouled by the winds. this is a velocity
i cannot stall. already, the golden coins
in the battered bow promise you to other shores.
my wintered mind scissors blindly in the dark.
child, in all the race there is no one else
like you. the fields are thick with flames and tendons.
the three seeping wombs of my dull wives
teem with viscid vermin. there will be no one else like you.
o romans, o romans.
where is our native land?
the soldiers lie demented in the fields,
agony is the torment of their minds. the warm
quilt in which your mother wrapped you lies
tattered at my foot. chilled pain comes
with the failed harvest and my empty hands.
i believe that this is winter.
o war, o whip, o waves.
Alani Rosa Hicks-Bartlett is a writer and translator from the Chicagoland area who now enjoys the Autumn foliage of the East Coast, where she finds herself increasingly in a nudiustertian mode. Her recent work has appeared in The Stillwater Review, IthacaLit, Cagibi, carte blanche, Broad River Review, La Piccioletta Barca, The Fourth River, and Mantis: A Journal of Poetry, Criticism, and Translation, among others. She is currently working a collection of villanelles as well as a series of translations from Medieval French, Portuguese, and Italian literature.
