Solastalgia – Kamil Czyz

Night reveals itself. I drenched the bed with fear

and now through the open window, I let darkness dry skin

of the fully woken,

yet amazed body to the racket of aroused traffic

and seagulls

fishing

in waste bins across the parking lot.

It is the time when living things come back to life.

It is the time when my father and I would climb deer stand

indiscernible within a landscape of lost dreams,

imperceptible within the border line that ruptures field

from amazed and yet fully woken forest.

Steam from the coffee flask stung orange glow of awaiting sun.

Firm embrace of noises lulled and at the same time held us up. Each

sound was a movement,

distortion in space amplified by vibration,

amplified by distance and time towards solitary breath

encompassing all being, a sharp moment when the rifle kicks back

with empty thud against shoulder, against perfectly still heart.

I let remnants of dusk to creep in,

I let the cosmos pry

open sweet prethoughts but once I don armour

of pressed shirt, slick hair, smile I tend to forget.

I fill the underground with a multitude, unscrupulous symmetry peopled

with the lost,

with bewildering promise of sex and food arrayed in colours of want.

I walk streets fully woken and yet amazed light dazzles,

spearheads the horizon of visible.

I am naked, progeny idolised, and city opens onto me,

onto the memory oblivious to the space long lost, timeless.

Kamil Czyz was born and raised in Olsztyn, Poland and now they live and write in Gdansk. Their poetry has been published in Multiplicity Commons, Detour Ahead, and Coffin Bell Journal, with forthcoming work to appear in BEATIFIC Magazine, Kind Writers, Open: Journal of Arts & Letters, The Dead Mule, and Chitro Magazine.