The American Dream Writes to Orpheus
- The American Dream Writes to Orpheus
The American Dream Writes to Orpheus, Poetry, Cynthia Dewi Oka
My love,
The tide is poised. Between you and I the end of the world
where an abandoned crane will either spit blueblazing desert from its graffiti lips or smashthe crow-bedecked tenements in search of a trumpet.
I am somewhere the horizon is slippery, quartered;a compost of insurrections mirroring the body.I am somewhere famished for a bare face.
The Hellfire travels 995 miles per hour. Where it lands, soulis freed like fire through skin, touching dirt for the first time.
A maggot's labor, like yours, is apostolic.
I'd like to tell you I've learned something of patience. Watching forbirds in the fash of windows beneath the eyelids, the wristin darkening sand. Are we really that different?
I am somewhere the shards of a wine jar,the coal on a mother's brow.I am somewhere deafened by wings.
You believe no shadow is lost, ever only searchingfor sound. Each continent begins with a cloud and is forever [End Page 46]
caesura. But have you felt kingdoms roll below you,your back the red sun in that gloaming hourwhen all the world's desire closes upon you?
Forgive me. Such a thin and treacherous marginthis drinking, singing river of heads,
this dying, singing river of breath. [End Page 47]
Born in Indonesia, cynthia dewi oka taught herself English by reading classics in a Canadian school library. She is the winner of the 2014 Editor's Prize in Poetry from Fifth Wednesday journal and an artist grant from the Vermont Studio Center. An alumna of the Voices of Our Nations Writers' Workshop, she is currently poetry editor of Generations Literary Journal. Her poems have appeared in The Wide Shore, Obsidian, Kweli Journal, Black Renaissance Noire, Apogee, Terrain.org, Boxcar Poetry Review, Dismantle, the VONA Anthology, and others.
