John Huey
The Divided Sky
The clouds from the West are running fast tonight while
in the East they are static and heavy.
It’s as if the sky itself is divided as is the land of my birth,
now with its parallel universes, filled with strange inhabitants
with fanciful creeds, inside the broken territories of OxyContin,
cheap liquor, toxic wine and cigarettes.
These are of the other land’s, now unknown to me though
some of those places were settled by my ancestors, those old
Huguenots running from Catholicism to a Protestant paradise
now turned dim and ugly by recessive generations.
The people out there seem like disembodied aliens, their
appearance, speech and manner stranger than some
of the tribes I knew out on the Soviet Steppe.
These new barbarians in our lands far more primitive than any
nomad, dangerous, superstitious, easily led.
Dazed sometimes, in the bloom of my 70 years, I awaken to days
unrecognizable, unnegotiable demands pouring out of contorted
mouths, a world with the veneers off, grasping hands dragging out
the most outrageous things from their deep, black-hearted recesses.
From my sickbed I tried to game it, tried to tell the kids that
all was well, that dad and their nation would be better soon.
But I fear, as this winter lies in wait, that I was buying my own
small heap of foolishness, wishing this away.
The sky moved to the deepest violet framing the drawn moon, the
darkest frame, the inner frame before first light, the tightness of a
longed for redemption drawn out of a septic wound that soaked
through our now ruined sheets, through the bed, through the
floorboards, out the door to the streets.
The rot we desired so intently forever in ubiquity.
John Huey is the author of The Moscow Poetry File (Finishing Line Press, 2017). His poems have appeared in Poetry Quarterly, Leannan Magazine, Sein und Werden, In Between Hangovers, Bourgeon, The Lost River Review, Red Wolf Journal, Poydras Review, Flatbush Review, Memoir Mixtapes, and Perfume River Poetry Review. His work has also appeared in the anthologies Temptation (Lost Tower Publications, 2016), edited by P.J. Reed; Unbelief (Local Gems Press, 2018), edited by Thomas Ragazzi and Marc Rosen; and Addiction & Recovery (Madness Muse Press, 2018), edited by Chani Zwibel. Online at john-huey.com.
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