I felt the fire’s rock-steady inertia pulling us along
through smoky clouds overlooking the glass ghost valley.
We rose where rivers intersect at the wrist like vapor
null to the sound of history’s heavy heartbeat.
We burned and crowed in harmony with rusty
road-show record players, rocked forth and back, lost
and high on the frequency of rickshaw radio, got lit
off those soothsayer poets, bohemian angels
whose albino guise danced the Macarena
under pale blue Boricua moonlight and led
our mariachi band to a sky where gravity sang
the violin verses of underwater maestros,
whose bloody feet fled the West Palm wasteland
after Los Angeles, after Philadelphia, after the Black
Swamp to chase down the last hellhounds in waking
madness, in the shadow of tombstone fields
where the writing thousands revived
Darwin and reminded the five-sided figures
to burn inside the church of time, inhale
paraffin breath from spitfire lungs.
All at once they opened their mouths, lit up
the midnight valley of the Midwest muse and cast
lonesome pavonian fireworks down the throat
where the bones and belly still cry for life.
Nathan Elias currently lives in Los Angeles pursuing a career in film and television. He was inspired to write poetry by a developing scene in Toledo, Ohio, and by the late poet Rane Arroyo. Elias’ work has
appeared in Red Fez, the beatnik, Dogz Plot, The Mill, Toledo Poetry Examiner and The Capstone Review. His chapbook “Glass City Blues” won the Shapiro Scholarship in 2010. His short screenplay was published in “Screenwriting 101:Starting Small While Thinking Big”, and his short films have screened at Toledo Museum of Art Film Festival, Texas Film Festival, Once A Week Online Film Festival, and MTV among other international publications.