vista view of Rocky Mountains with evergreen trees in foreground

Dream on, cowboy. All this whirling present – the silent factories, failing malls, those generations fearsome in their newness – cracks into a [sunlit] past. The prairies re-emerge, bison miles tapering first to mountains, then desert. Now the saguaro and choreographed tumbleweed, sidekick and revolver. These vistas are empty mirrors for your looping revery. Tiny hordes dissipate in the face of your ilk, a sightless law in a single tongue shot through/stiff in all of this, unyielding and for you. Dream on as if it were not dreaming. You are what you imagine.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This poem was selected from entries submitted to our Creative Challenge Series #52: First Sentence, which required that the first sentence in the text must be used as given.