The Meadow Annual Literary Arts Journal 2022

16 The Meadow The Walk Merlin Ural Rivera Day four—the sun is still black, the dust roasted brown like torrefied wheat, a splash of salt-white air above the desert. Forward burst those who know where they’re going, a wondrous perestroika blooming in their heads, not a drop of sweat on their silk ties, ambitions tall like sequoias. The jugglers—a slow parade— are left behind, eyes in the sky, and questions, questions curving in the air like slimy intestines. Yet another poète maudit among them, and a brush-biter with blue teeth, cigarette-slim dancers and trumpeters blowing moonlight out of horns. Tongues red and slippery, lead-heavy with wine, like soldiers out of harness, they trudge along aimless, and dream of sixteen cups of coffee, and opium, things promised to them at the edge of the world things that children, hereabouts, pay to see. The tide, they say to those ahead, the tide is ebbing.

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