Bryan Price

it won’t come as you think—on horseback like in the movies it’ll be more like when the dog’s foot gets caught in a trap and she tries to pretend that she’s fine: smiles turns back with a look in her eye that refuses to see the hawk in the tree or notice that the air has gone still—silence rolling off the unseasonably gray sky not even ambient noise to stir the mind just deep blood-on-the-cloth silence the kind that ushers death in to assemble its history of dreams everything unwashed and dressed in its deepest mourning black smoke comes off the rooftops in the distance as the farms empty their veins like volcanoes the whole artifice holding us together dissolves everything toppled by whatever the opposite of amnesia is

Author Bio

Bryan D. Price is the author of the forthcoming collection of elegies, A Plea for Secular Gods (What Books Press, 2023). His work has appeared in UCity Review, Posit, and DMQ Review (among others). He lives and teaches in Southern California.