Like the Rains That Wouldn’t Quit and the Sounds Left Behind
by Bobby Bolt III

Runestone, volume 2

The river pulses through its past, like the lover who must know all surfaces and remember them with liquid touch. A history of humanity, catalog for our collective offenses made of trailing sediment—at the mouth, it all piles up. There’s a drought in California, and seventy-five percent of the dust in your home is dead skin cells. From the canyon, an echo sounded through time which found every face and rock veering through terrestrial space. This lost song would paint each wall unknown, and the canyon itself became sound: the lyric whisper of matricide and all her aimless wounds, our home. They were beautiful, too, like the smile to which I once heard a mother compare her scars. I remember how my face would stretch and twist for you, and I learned of happiness like a scar that sometimes forgets to hurt. Water will remember the walls, the deepening, and knows its perennial flowing. From the canyon, an echo sounded through time to when I was painted in song and red with Cimarron dust. I wore old cells then—matter from an ancient cough—descending to walk home with memories of rust, sucked through a straw.

BOBBY BOLT III

University of Illinois at Springfield

Bobby Bolt is an English student from Springfield, Illinois, who will begin a candidacy for an MFA in Poetry at Texas State University this Fall.  His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Alchemist Review, Route 7 Review, Pretty Owl Poetry, Rappahannock Review, Sink Hollow, and Lincoln Land Review.

Pin It on Pinterest

Share This