A Valley Fable by Kyle Hemmings

When I grow tired of the city's chalk downs & clay people
 who have disowned rock, I visit the girl melting in the tunnel valley,
her fragile fjord walls and her flat bottom ships. With a violent
avalanche of our pasts, our shoulders shudder, we hang ourselves
 over brooks, become reborn in a cirque. So high over a divide,
we chance standing on a terraced floor on one foot. She borrows
 a bridal veil from a mis-spent cloud. We blossom near a vast alluvial fan.
 We erode into the lips of a river that whispers hollow, that seeps
our sentiment into the hands of a woman longing for her children,
drowning in her reflection.


Kyle Hemmings, New Jersey, USA