January 2025
Alex Stolis
stolisalex@gmail.com
stolisalex@gmail.com
Bio Note: I live in Minneapolis and have had poems published in numerous journals. Two full length collections Pop. 1280, and John Berryman Died Here were released by Cyberwit and available on Amazon. My chapbook, Postcards from the Knife-Thrower's Wife, was released by Louisiana Literature Press in 2024, RIP Winston Smith from Alien Buddha Press 2024, and The Hum of Geometry; The Music of Spheres, 2024 by Bottlecap Press.
The Lord’s Prayer in The Church of Atomic City
Minneapolis Radiation Oncology
Unreachable father, in the far corners of never.
We are told you’re the master of everywhere
as if being watched by you is an enviable privilege.
Our frail bodies cursed to failure, our past
lives, thick with beauty on either side.
We’re given biopsies, radiation, medications
never knowing the lessons taught,
but learning to love what’s left behind.
Keep your forgiveness, your forsaken son, guilt
and fairytale evil. We were created flightless,
angelic, with the strength to deliver ourselves
from the garden. In the end, we’ll fall asleep,
wake reborn in a forest, foggy with dream;
heaven brilliant-black, shining with truth.
Tonight Time Falls Back
written with Catherine Arra
Our lapsed years layered in dormancy
will loosen, free hands to unravel
each linen strip soaked in cedar resin,
sculpted to our embrace.
We will be tender in our disrobing,
disarming, quiet in our sleepy waking.
We will live inside infinity, tumble
through a cancer diagnosis, untether
threads of triangulated radiation, create
a world we design, our names
on the lips of wind, rain; our story
written in the rustle of deer at wood’s edge.
Hollowed of mortality and sin,
we will drift forward in a wake of natron
and sawdust, grateful for amulets, afterlife,
for love after love.
We will exhale, close eyes. Our life the razor
tip of an arrowhead.
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