You perceive the sky before you
when you perceive me, my body,
a wide breathless place of light.
We don’t so much fly as shake off
our skins and tumble up.
We’ve always been ready to lift
our feet from this earth, to bind
ourselves with wind to the air.
This sun soaks us with its reverberations
blurs our outstretched arms
until we can’t hide any more,
until we baptize the ground
from the chrism of our shadows.
Joshua Gage is an ornery curmudgeon from Cleveland. His first full-length collection, breaths, is available from VanZeno Press. Intrinsic Night, a collaborative project he wrote with J. E. Stanley, was published by Sam’s Dot Publishing. His most recent collection, Inhuman: Haiku from the Zombie Apocalypse, is available on Poet’s Haven Press. He is a graduate of the Low Residency MFA Program in Creative Writing at Naropa University. He has a penchant for Pendleton shirts, rye whiskey, and any poem strong enough to yank the breath out of his lungs.
