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Heather Thill

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Streetlamp

You, a jackknife to silhouettes
Stand broken on this flooded street
Midnight is a busted spring
An eruption of headlights

These withered knots of light
Meander through your legs
Scathing this city of asphalt and broken bone.

You return to me at every corner.
How is it when you turn like this
A glance creates a factory of amber in my head
I remain blinded until the onyx of cause returns.

My medicine was the birth of your compass
The silence of your steel frame that buckles,
It is the cocaine for a set of footprints
Leaning against your chest bolted to the ground.

I close to dream of your thighs
That your legs should move with me,
To pass the time, to count dying lives,
To kiss those that walk on their knees.

But, tonight you are my mother
You talk to me while staring back in my eyes
As if to gain some temperament of flesh
When you say nothing at all.

Still, there you stand
Siblings guaranteed like a flock of geese
Never lonely, your drug the sound of thunder
I am nothing but the dirt under your fingernail
When you remember that you can’t feel.

There are times when you give more than light,
More than some valid response or limitless shrug.
And there is now,
When you prove nothing more than being familiar
As some ghost, some religious beacon
Pointing towards an address I’ve forgotten.

This is Heather’s third appearance in The Wolf magazine. She currently lives in Iowa and is a keen painter and photographer.

Page(s) 47-48

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