Shilo Niziolek
And the Angels Were Humans Braced for the Fall
We moved from the desert to a town on the side of a hill,
pinned in by the Columbia & Youngs Bay rivers, ocean ahead--
I thought it was a kingdom, thought I’d found heaven,
or something like it, but after I’d met him, the boy whom
I worshipped in all the unholy ways, knees in the mud,
& after rain poured so hard part of the hill slunk off its
own side, & the black tar road tremulous, shifted, cracked
and bruised itself, and we walked it in the dark of night,
nothing about that ungodly hill making sense, the river
always sparkling out ahead while on land the angels swarmed
above their own not-yet-built graves on muddy land, & later
when a storm ripped windows out of storefronts, smashed glass,
trees, & left power lines whipping on the ground, & when I hid
from him in a ditch, only to be found and consoled, satiated
by my own hunger, that diabolical force which still haunts me
now as I sleep, I discovered what someone must have known:
that all heavenly kingdoms must crumble under the weight of greed;
that greed is how we learned to love against trees, bare skin against
soft lichen, in the crush of my back seat, on holy nights, wind
thrashing through trees and the north star twinkling in our eyes.
pinned in by the Columbia & Youngs Bay rivers, ocean ahead--
I thought it was a kingdom, thought I’d found heaven,
or something like it, but after I’d met him, the boy whom
I worshipped in all the unholy ways, knees in the mud,
& after rain poured so hard part of the hill slunk off its
own side, & the black tar road tremulous, shifted, cracked
and bruised itself, and we walked it in the dark of night,
nothing about that ungodly hill making sense, the river
always sparkling out ahead while on land the angels swarmed
above their own not-yet-built graves on muddy land, & later
when a storm ripped windows out of storefronts, smashed glass,
trees, & left power lines whipping on the ground, & when I hid
from him in a ditch, only to be found and consoled, satiated
by my own hunger, that diabolical force which still haunts me
now as I sleep, I discovered what someone must have known:
that all heavenly kingdoms must crumble under the weight of greed;
that greed is how we learned to love against trees, bare skin against
soft lichen, in the crush of my back seat, on holy nights, wind
thrashing through trees and the north star twinkling in our eyes.
Biography
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Shilo Niziolek's (she/her) cnf manuscript, Fever, was first runner-up in Red Hen Press's Quill Prose Prize and a finalist in Zone 3 Press's 2021 CNF Award. Her work has appeared in [PANK], Juked, Entropy, HerStry, among others, and is forthcoming in the CLR, Gingerbread House and Pork Belly Press's zine: Love Me, Love My Belly. Shilo holds an MFA from New England College and is Associate Faculty at Clackamas Community College.
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