These vulture’s shadows glide between valleys of loose shoulder bone.The sun’s red glare rising over a famished riverbed reminds me of how many miles I’ve walked with a fierce thirst for the unattainable. I feel my animal tongue withering inside my mouth like a tree root, but I’ve sucked all the nectar from this sweet cactus flower. Dust tucked in the corner of my eyelids, I step wearily as though this body will crack into the hot earth that swells beneath my feet or collapse among these swirling braids of sand. As if the spirit could evaporate from flesh, the color in my pupils draining of their bluish light like water from a dead oasis, like the world I see and everything else in it: a twisted mirage.
John Roth is currently enrolled as a first year student in the Northeast Ohio Master of Fine Arts program. His poems have appeared in Red River Review, The Eunoia Review, Toasted Cheese Journal, and Bird's Thumb, among others.
