I dream up cathedrals spun from chrome and empty
canyons painted blue and morose statues in a yard where
we might always be together. For so long I couldn’t speak
to anyone, righteous with disbelief before God like Zachariah
and his stolen song, nor could I see you clearly. Myopia
my refuge. I broke into sweats and soaked like snail’s feet.
Must desire always entail breaking? I desire and so something
inside me must be broken. Apocalypse hums above me now
and all I do is hear your voice: an angel in the midst of everything.
Fistfuls from a bag of sugar. In dreams I drop an impossible snow
and so I cloak another earth with the unmade down of my regret.
My memory kisses the floor of a canyon I keep making
and every person speaks to me with your voice.
Louie Leyson writes on the unceded ancestral territory of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations. Their work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and National Magazine Awards, was awarded a CBC Literary Prize in Nonfiction, and has received a grant by the Canada Council for the Arts. You can find their works in Catapult, The Malahat Review, Plenitude, Palette, and elsewhere. TWITTER
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