DJ HILLS
Everywhere in Baltimore Litanies of Ravens
pockmark the sky; and meanwhile I’m afraid
the only pictures I have of you are losing their color
like beach houses with their identical façades—your smile
wasting away in whatever light is left at the end of the season,
until I will be forced to remember you stone-faced and sad—
in another bedroom, in another corner of this Hitchcockian city. And really,
I wouldn’t mind the birds so much if they didn’t remind me of you:
their fine feathers and preening; their un-musical voice; the paling
they form along rooftops, reducing me to a passing curiosity, or more likely,
not caring about me at all; marking their days by the sun,
and the sturdy comfort of branches, which might have been
my hands if I could ever learn to stand so still.
Leaving Earth
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6 7
8
1. Our bones are made of exploded stars.
2. We are only the shrapnel of brighter things; our names
3. nothing but a way to mark where we’ve been.
4. I go in search of the nameless so that I may be unnamed, too.
5. I cannot kill a cat to ease its suffering but in childhood I held a corn husk in my small, cruel fist and whipped our family pet until it howled.
6. (Even in space I am not weightless.
7. I have brought with me all the colors of fall.)
8. Impossible to trust any permanent thing keeps the ocean from spilling into the sky.
DJ Hills is a writer and theatre artist from the Appalachian Mountains, currently pursuing their MFA in playwriting at UCLA. Their writing appears most recently in SmokeLong Quarterly, wigleaf, and Oyster River Pages. Their chapbook Leaving Earth will be published by Split Rock Press in 2022.