“While You’re Gone” by Kika Dorsey
What would you do with me in the unimagined prairie?
—Louise Mathias, from “Desire Path”
Crown vetch blooms purple and wild along the ditch,
a skeleton of a prairie dog lies fractured at my feet
and I walk with a woman
who teaches children
and then she’s gone,
I can tear off my mask, breathe,
and return to you.
I ask, what will our children see when we’re gone?
and you with the flipside of my ancestor’s bloodlines,
that tail of our coin, our silver children.
My cousin sends me a picture of his tall son
whom I’ve never met, in Texas along the Gulf Coast.
My sister sends me a photo of her son at a lake
in Georgia, playing with plastic cats
and you and our son just left to climb in a canyon in Utah,
he with rope slung over his shoulder,
you tugging at your blue hat.
And what would you do with me in the unimagined prairie?
What will our son see when fevers
stop teasing mercury into the seas of our bodies
and I on my desk
with the abandoned turtle shell,
a pattern I can’t read,
a father buried,
a mother’s ashes on a shrine placed in a desk above
bills I can’t pay
and what will my children see when I’m gone?
I’ve loved you too long and not long enough,
that’s all I know,
and today the ditch is so full it’s almost flooding.
Did I tell you that before you left?
And I know you like to collect bones
but I left the prairie dog skeleton alone.
I don’t know why.
Maybe I thought it needed to stay where its blood
was buried to feed the prairie grass,
the dry earth now with all that loss,
and you and our son leave.
Our daughter lifeguards in chlorinated pools.
They say the chemicals kill the virus.
I walk along the ditch
or pull bindweed off the columbine.
They’re yellow and tipping, nodding
toward the ground.
The sky is so wide today it seems
everything could fit in it.
Somewhere, in an unimagined prairie,
a dark horse is galloping toward a water hole.
He must be so thirsty.
About Kika Dorsey
She/Her/Hers
Kika Dorsey is a poet and fiction writer in Boulder, Colorado, and lives with her two children, husband, and pets. Her books include Beside Herself (Flutter Press, 2010) and three full-length collections, Rust, Coming Up for Air (Word Tech Editions, 2016, 2018), and Occupied: Vienna is a Broken Man and Daughter of Hunger (Pinyon Publishing, 2020). She has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize five times. Currently, she is an instructor of English at Front Range Community College and works as a writing coach and ghostwriter. In her free time, she swims miles in pools and runs and hikes in the open space of Colorado’s mountains and plains.