Zachary Riddle, Central Michigan University

I am stoneskinned in the wake of you—infested, nightmared,
a scarecrow in a barren field, sunsore and crucified, nails pierced

through hayweed veins. At dawn, tasked with creation,
I leave the city lightless

and blindly run my fingers across the bridge of your nose,
slowly skim the thin of your upper lip, the small of your thumb,

the whole of your lower back. I sew myself into your treeborn
body, make seams between our myths and merge—

one fractured cosmos with another. You trace the fire
between fjord and shipdeck and tell me:

The sun rises and sets within two hours in Antarctica.
Under swollen red stars, I explain that I’ve lived

below Orion’s Belt my entire life, that I’ve only
seen the Southern sky in photographs.

Zachary Riddle is a senior at Central Michigan University. He is the President of The Poets’ Collective, the Editor-in-Chief of The Central Review, and a soon-to-be graduate student in the creative writing program at CMU. He was accepted for publication in the spring 2013 edition of The Central Review (preceding employment), as well as the fall 2014 edition of Temenos. He loves all things related to literature, and presented a paper at a conference in Utah at the end of March 2015. He appreciates the time you spend reading these poems, and hopes, more than anything, that you enjoy them.