Hades

Hades Aria Aber poetry Where did he go? I asked. Where do the missing ever go? Imagine silence, the tyrant, growing thick over the casket lowered into the ground with nothing resting on its leather—just the red daybook and the shirt of Rolling Stones scented still with pine and cheap cologne, tobacco. An entire population sunk to the bottom of the sea. Plastic forks, black boxes. Daily, filtered light gleams on the gold teeth of the disappeared. There’s a pile of nameless bones eroding the soil under a thousand hungry mouths of Himalayan blue poppy. And bullet casings litter the dirt, glimmering like coins. A cloth that, weighted with ice water, slapped his face the way a mother would in rage and grief. The day they buried into earth the thing without the body, all the apple blossoms, I heard, floated back into the gaunt arms of trees. 18 | ARIA ABER ...