paper chickens (Sidney, Nebraska)
I revisit that March in my prairie dreams:
leather peacocks and paper chickens,
cruel snow drifts trapping us
in the toe of a wooden horseshoe.
We’re chasing love and land in a heap,
feathers flying, beaks chipped
from our narrow escape.
The frozen lakes soon
swallow us up, crave our
otherness with an abhorrent hunger,
They eat my mountains,
spit out your trees, shove us west,
hard, against the wind & against love
until an ambulance rushing past
my bedroom window just now
shakes me awake, reminds me that
we’re finally on opposite sides
of the river, each safe on our own shore.
Dusti RW Levy is a queer/disabled Gen X dramaturg who runs delicate emissions poetry zine and is the managing editor of BOUDIN’s fiction chapbook contest; they’re on the editorial staff of The McNeese Review and Thirteen Bridges Review. Dusti writes about love, longing, grief, and ghosts from the Louisiana prairie.