Words 7.16.2020

No Language

By Donnie Hollingsworth

For years I’d see Tim free fall from some height while sitting still in the backwoods of his life after his wife died of alcohol poisoning he cut off his heart finger like a Lakota as he told her story I imagined the silhouette of a woman staring out of a window the light is so intense it pushes the edges of her silhouette towards the middle into a thin black line waving like a blade of grass in the wind

...while trembling we still offer our hand we still take the journey

off the grid: wireless walls (I still feel the feral freedom of being when I asked about what’s inside (what you taught from a branch bowed down from 56 winters of snow living from the bottom of the world you inherit the dread of things being upside-down forever ...you said “what you see is what you get”

an unexpected heart attack while alone

You existed. You took breath. You loved your cabin on the mountain: red gravel and clay silt an old miner’s road that led from your front yard (your best friend: a crow up the unnamed mountain (flies miles above searching for you to a grassy cliff overlooking the 25 corridor where we sat once in remnants of an older cabin--a silver miner only the outline of a foundation remained and it felt like wind and rain were watching each other and that we are all like missing stones ::: dropped into the sea at midnight every day we live and die at the same time as blood runs the border between like dead a man’s river that drips away like trying to see someone approaching through glass when all you can make out is a glare from the inside

through the misty panes of the cabin ::: I see footprints

::: in the snow leading up to the door

Donnie Hollingsworth has lived in many small Rocky Mountain towns, and currently resides in La Junta, Colorado, with his cat and wife.