Michael Dwayne Smith

I wanted to be 

a young woman
leaping from a tall building,
which I cannot do
because my body is made of sky
and to fall through myself
is what makes me a man,
this dying upward.

Michael Dwayne Smith lives near a Mojave Desert ghost town, where his latest book, Roadside Epiphanies (Cholla Needles Press, 2017), was conjured.