Mass Ascension
By Jenny Boyar
On Evacuating to the Albuquerque Balloon Festival During Hurricane Milton I am telling a story in colors, a field unending where even absence is a landscape of blue sky and air. In a field once filled with absence balloons are blooming like lungs while the heart, first a flame, dies and then flickers, sends heaviness alighting to fly away faster. What then of darkness? Disaster slows time to a during and after while sorrow is more of a slow rise and fall, an arid sky and its receding shores. But all of this is neither story nor metaphor. Elsewhere, there is a storm I will never fully escape. A sky is descending beneath the weight of what we set in motion. What I can say of this moment is that I felt neither fire nor fear just the ground that holds immeasurable meaning under a sky that is graveyard for the untethered, while the field is where we gave it all away.
Jenny Boyar's poetry has been published in Maudlin House, Panorama, and elsewhere, and her essays have appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Gulf Stream Magazine, and several scholarly publications. A Fulbright recipient, she holds a PhD in English from the University of Rochester. She works as a medical writer and lives in St Petersburg, Florida.
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