Your Fallow Fingers
by Kika Dorsey
Your days fall into grass and fallen suns,
no man as broken and careless as you.
So many days I felt burnt and done,
while stars stood in place and the moon ensued
its sinking truth. Autumn strips the land
of green and geese, body defeated earth.
On the shore children mold turtles out of sand
from fire you flung from skies to melt and birth
the glass that only I can break. My hips
a red hum and the garden sleeps, rests
its weary ghost, while I trace red, your lips
to build a castle, where I reach up to wrest
the weapon from your large, loud embrace,
your fallow fingers, your sun’s shattered face.
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Kika Dorsey is a poet in Boulder, Colorado, and lives with her two children, husband, and Border Collie. She wakes up every morning and crafts poetry out of dreams, myths, her body, and her travels. While finishing her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature in Seattle, Washington, she performed her poetry with musicians and artists. Her poems have been published in The Denver Quarterly, The Pennsylvania Literary Journal, The Comstock Review, Freshwater, The Columbia Review, among numerous other journals and books. . Her collection of poems, Beside Herself , was published by Flutter Press. Her full-length collection, Rust, came out with Word Tech Editions in 2016. Her forthcoming book, Coming Up For Air, comes out in 2018. She is an adjunct instructor of English at Front Range Community College. When not writing or teaching, she taxis her teenagers to activities, swims miles in pools, and runs and hikes in the open space of Colorado’s mountains and plains.