The Witch’s Flight 1
I see you rounding the corner
with your flag. You made it yourself
from a table cloth, put some
knobs on it, bright colors
called yourself a beginning
of something still undefined
still nowhere to be found
and I am there beside you
waiting for it to happen.
The Witch’s Flight 2
I saw you rounding the corner
with your flag made of burlap
embroidered with pearls.
You were running out the door
with your gun in your hand
shouting something in Babel
about the bible and the trouble
it believes in. I believed
in you, in what enveloped
the particles of you
a kind of robe of iconic ego.
We were the same age then
both infantile and archaic.
The Witch’s Flight 3
I saw you rounding the corner
with your flag wrapped around
a bag of illicit something
though when I got closer it was
wrapped around your head.
I stuck around for a while
pretending to be you
as I stared into its thread
unable to imagine what
was woven there. And I realized
it was what you had become
a fluttering chalice for your gun.
The Witch’s Flight 4
I saw you rounding the corner
with your flag of mud
that kept dragging you to
the ground as you sneezed.
It was no mere welcome mat.
It had teeth in its orientation
videos, and they spread
throughout the surrounding
zone holding every enduring
delirium in place. That’s
how they said the X-Anon
rider got his first set
of faces, and we held
them in a loving choke
of advanced studies cloak.
The Witch’s Flight 5
I saw you rounding the corner
with your flag that was
a giant ear. I know you
could hear me coming
even though your sleepy eyes
were cloaked as you floated
in your dream streaming
your trepidations behind you.
The flag was weeping
as were the windows
of the hotel, the many ports
to other lives we saw
as you passed and moved on
to greater simulacra.
The ear was a heart
but not your flag, which
bandaged up your disapproval—
feral, intrepidly threaded
mixed in the way it hung
in tedium with much of life
the way it’s captured
by the senses and spun
in the theater reactor
of a killer theme park
sprung from the glands.
The Witch’s Flight 6
Because you were the blind
anchor you could not see
your flag the way the audience
had, rounding a corner
which was a circle
giving you a living sense
John Schertzer is the author of the novel Bellamonia and a poetry collection, Second Nature. His poems, fictions, and hybrids have been published in Big Other, Inverted Syntax, The Germ, American Letters & Commentary, 1913 Journal, The Cortland Review, La Petite Zine, Danse Macabre, LIT, and other journals.
Image: newsweek.com
Check out HFR’s book catalog, publicity list, submission manager, and buy merch from our Spring store. Follow us on Instagram and YouTube. Disclosure: HFR is an affiliate of Bookshop.org and we will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase. Sales from Bookshop.org help support independent bookstores and small presses.
Heavy Feather Review 