Christien Gholson

Mercy

What's been lost follows me up
            the mountain. A lone crow

somewhere on the trail ahead. His
            voice, all gravel and rags. 

A slight ripple across the reflection
            of a piñon branch in a

sandstone pool. The same vibration
            that moves through 

the hollows inside my chest (looking
            for a way out, finding

none). I long for sleep, the right
            dream. Human sleep and

juniper roots, twins in the same dark
            amniotic sac, knowing

the other is near, so close—What is
            this shape? Is it part

of me? Shadows form at twilight
            among bare trees, the same

shapes drawn by those who see
            what others call hallucination

—this, they look like this: a head, shoulders,
            great-coat, dissolution at

the feet…a Pygmy Owl turns its head,
            scans the ground. Near home,

I see a man beneath the streetlight
            that never shuts off

(the one I call Our Lady of Perpetual
            On-Ness), arms spread,

looking up. Begging for mercy. When
            I'm close, he dissolves up into 

the light, a weave of bare branches
            against the first few stars.

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Christien Gholson is the author of several books of poetry, including the forthcoming The Next World (Shanti Arts), Absence: Presence (Shanti Arts) and All the Beautiful Dead (Bitter Oleander); along with a novel, A Fish Trapped Inside the Wind (Parthian Books). Several of his chapbooks can be found online, including Tidal Flats (Mudlark). He is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, with work appearing in Ecotone, Permafrost, Flyway, Banyan Review, The Shore, Hotel Amerika, Tiger Moth Review and The Sun, among other journals. He lives in Oregon and works as a somatic-oriented mental health therapist at a clinic collective. https://christiengholson.blogspot.com/.