Prayer in the Badlands

when we stop to take the night’s dimensions,
sky laid bare as split fruit
seeded with stars—

when we trace the vast geometry
from point to point, naming
the shapes we know—

tail of scorpio,
cassiopeia’s throne—

when we tilt back our heads,
pinwheeling with whiskey and impossible scale—
we find ourselves saying what we know

more clearly, feeling the rifts
will never be healed, the deepest parts of the river
never named

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Thanks to Silk Road Review, in which this poem first appeared.