1

Autumn rain collects in our leaf-filled gutters and drips on the grill. The rhythm of it is faster than my heart, each beat of the water’s drum defying any dissonance the rain could create like during the flood ten years ago, which turned our streets to rivers. I listen to its drip, drop, drip drop, and I am a kind mind, a living mind; I allow the rain to have its way.

2

I was in a car accident and now loud sounds make me jump. Do you know the smell of airbags when they deploy and tear with your weight? It’s a chemical smell. The car fills with smoke as it spins. Now I am alone with the rain and my bruises.

I don’t think I’ll ever be surprised again. I don’t think, job, light, fire, blood. I don’t let my body come out.

3

My son says he is dissecting cadavers for school. I imagine the boy I gave birth to, how he was purple with the effort to travel through me, how this boy now had to witness so much death. But there is always a poetry when we look at how we muscle through the world and build our homes. The paint cracks, some remedies are poisonous, the guilty party doesn’t confess, the façade falls, the river breaks through its banks, and it never stops raining. But I know my son has a roof over his head. I know he can plant his feet on this spinning earth.

4

Most people will not be your friend. Most water will not freeze. Most snowflakes will melt. Your blood will travel mostly in your body, even if you bleed. The future is a dim light. You say you don’t want to go. You say you haven’t packed and the dog needs you. You say, job, dark, ice, stop spinning, stop spinning. Outside, the heart of the world is beating anyway, telling you to move on.

Kika Dorsey

is a poet and fiction writer in Boulder, Colorado, whose poems and stories have been published in Freshwater, The Columbia Review, The Comstock Review, The Denver Quarterly, The Pennsylvania Literary Journal, and numerous other journals and books. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize five times.

She is the author of three full-length collections, Occupied: Vienna is a Broken Man and Daughter of Hunger (Pinyon Publishing, 2020), winner of the Colorado Authors’ League Award for best poetry collection; Rust (2016) and Coming Up for Air (2018), both from Word Tech Editions; and a chapbook, Beside Herself (Flutter Press, 2010).

Ms. Dorsey has a PhD in Comparative Literature, and she’s currently a lecturer in literature and creative writing at the University of Colorado. In addition, she works as a writing coach and ghostwriter. In her free time she swims miles in pools and runs and hikes in the open space of Colorado’s mountains and plains.

Author’s website: http://kikadorsey.com