Two Poems by Wes Solether

Greetings everyone! This is the big week & we’re starting it off right with several new contributors. First off, we have Wes Solether of Rock Island, IL. Wes is a student at Augustana College and recently appeared in the second issue of an outstanding new online magazine called Clementine (see link below). Here’s what he had to say about these two poems:


“I have always been interested in Invisible Cities and the fantastic ways that Calvino describes Venice. This summer, I went to Prague for a poetry workshop and fell in love with the city. I also got to finish The Baron in the Trees by Calvino while I was in Italy, really getting to see what he was writing about. The combination of traveling abroad, envisioning the cities I have been to, and your call for submissions led me to create some Invisible Cities of my own.”

And here they are, “The Windy City” and “The Haloed City”:

The Windy City


Appearing as a scar in the sea,
the Windy City has been dug out
five miles below the earth,
nestled between moth-eaten stone
and writhing worms.
The city rests on an opaque gullet filled to the teeth
with the carcasses of dolphins and whales.
A natural cemetery filling beneath us.

The waterfall from the sea
bisects the city into a blue world and a black world,
depending on what side you look through.
Both sides of residents see distorted images of themselves,
believing that demonic doppelgangers are on the other side.
The two sides war with sticks and broken bones
hurled through the waterfall,
striking stone and flesh.

Sometimes mistaken for the sound of fallen angels,
the wind breathes into the broken bones of the dead.
A resurrection of sound
created by a symphony of skull holes and earthworm paths.

The living in the city and the dead of the sea is a blurred line
when pots and pans are drilled out ribs
and the building are made with ivy withered from waves,
bone wrought with bone.


The Haloed City


The city consists of concentric circles
brilliantly lit at all hours of the day,
and no one knows how they are powered.
Everyone in the city is in a constant state of marriage.
When we entered,
we were separated by gender
and brought to the compatibility chamber
to meet our new spouses.

Some say it is a random process,
while the official stance is divine intervention.

The city exists in three sections.
The only couples allowed to live inside the innermost circles
must be married for at least fifty years.
The innermost section is full of gardens
and brims with golden light from underground,
creating a phantom lake around the legs
of the couples permitted to live there.
The golden gardens are really just cemeteries.

Sectioned off by a canal or a moat,
the Middle Circles of the Haloed City
are being worn down slowly by a heavy fog
that permeates through the sandy brick
and blankets the bedrooms
and sometimes you can’t see the face of your spouse
from across the dinner table.

The Outer Rim is little more than train tracks and box cars
where newly weds struggle to light a match.
There is no fog here,
but the air is heavy with throats
and whispers spoken harshly at night.
Cracked windows and punched-in walls
are always repaired by the morning.

Behind the twenty foot wall of the city limits,
exiled angels search dumpsters
to lick out the arteries of the recently deceased,
trying to find the source of the city’s lights.


BIO: Wes Solether is a current student at Augustana College in Rock Island, IL. Craving a European adventure, he has gone across the pond to get lost on the cobbled streets of Prague. He also fought gladiators and weight gain in Rome and created a shortage of sangria in Barcelona. Recently, he has been published in Clementine.