Paul Ilechko
Image by Kelly Sikkema from Pexels
Paul Ilechko is British American poet and occasional songwriter who lives with his partner in Lambertville, NJ. His work has appeared in many journals, including The Night Heron Barks, Tampa Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, Stirring, and The Inflectionist Review. He has also published several chapbooks.
The Receding Arc
I am trying to tell you things about nature
about the natural world about the way
in which the sun crosses the sky
and the impact that it has on everything
beneath its arc about the sea as it existed
as the great highway of thieves drenched
by a massive storm telling us all that
we needed to know I remember how
you had been locked in a basement
with a dirt floor and all of the things
that happened to you there amidst
the piles of empty boxes dimly lit by
too-weak bulbs that flickered when
the connecting door was opened after you
were released you showered and dressed
in clean clothes and drove the hour
and a half to the state border past the farms
with endless fields of cattle and sheep
the farms that would later be abandoned
as the plague burned its way across the land
this also natural – a part of the arc of life
itself but you were long gone by then
surrounded by people and concrete
towers beneath a thin sliver of sky.
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