Dan Wiencek

I Would Be an Ally to You

I love your story too much
not to covet it for myself.
I picture you hitching here
from a town with a taffy store
and a two-color stop light, your
third eye hidden under bangs.

We link arms and square off
against rogue headwinds, no
quarter asked or given. We
question the manhole covers
that mark the places where the
horses fell.

When a thousand boots strike
the pavement, you hurl yourself
in bottles. The future dissolves
in front of us and there is only
burning clouds, glass, vultures
in creaking leather waiting
to strip the dead.

You are standing at my side
and our thoughts spill on to
each other: the next war
will be fought with telephones.
Water will become money

and I am convinced we will
replenish the fallow skies and
turn the clocks ahead fifty years
if I only keep breathing your air.

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Tell Me Something about You No One Else Knows

observing two girls
striding down a sidewalk
of pristine squares
tall pale legs
yellow flowers
a slope of lawn

you describe a dream
of lying in bed
all night, exhausted
but unable to sleep

you woke and dozed
and woke again
in the dream
over and over until
waking and dreaming
were indistinguishable

you show me
the scar you made
on your thigh
when morning finally came
and the question needed settling
one way or the other

the girls disappear
around a corner
and we agree that nothing
is as perfect
as freshly poured
sidewalk.

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Dan Wiencek’s poetry has appeared in publications that include New Ohio Review, Sou’wester, The Briar Cliff Review, and Carve. His first collection of poems, Routes Between Raindrops, was published by First Matter Press in 2021. When not making poems, he writes for a luxury travel company and has walked in the same shoes on the Pyramids, the Taj Mahal, the Serengeti Plains and the Abbey Road crosswalk. Someday, he will write a poem about those shoes. Born and raised in Illinois, he now lives with his wife in a large city in the Pacific Northwest.

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