The Wanderer, by Richard-Yves Sitoski

The Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, Caspar David Friedrich (Germany) 1818

The Wanderer

When you arrive at the summit there’s no place left. You forget there are cities like Istanbul which have parks full of young boys on circumcision day dressed as sultans in gold Elvis rhinestones, laughing with each other amid the scraggly pines, while their families picnic in neck ties and makeup before the sun sets a painful orange, as if the minarets were backlit by a great incandescent koi who swam into the crepuscule from a pond so deep and still history no longer matters.

Richard-Yves Sitoski
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Richard-Yves Sitoski (he/him) is a songwriter, performance poet, visual artist, and the 2019-2023 Poet Laureate of Owen Sound, on the territory of the Saugeen Ojibway Nation. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Prairie Fire, Train, The Fiddlehead, Bywords.ca, and elsewhere. He has given performances in industrial ruins, has read poems to earth worms, and has written verse on snow with biodegradable dye. His latest book is No Sleep ‘til Eden, an augmented reality multimedia collection of poems on the environment.