Aidan Chafe

Open Prairies of Whispers

The walls are painted cowboys

and perforated with bullet holes.

I sleep-in to hide from my tears,

the double-barrel lens of waking.

A soft violence of light uproots me.

Morning ritual: a kindling of lead

mining the blood buried in my gums.

Prayers rise like raptures, settle

the eyes’ flickering filaments, pluck

hostilities splintered in the mind.

For a rider, absence is a horse

on the open prairies of whispers.

I move through this world as absence.

Diagnosis galloping through me.

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