Heaven Up on the Hill
We don’t exactly finish each other’s sentences. But when we rose up to meet that two-lane
Wisconsin road, we traded verses from CCM songs. Point of Grace. Michael W. Smith. Once,
songs of innocence sung now as songs of knowing.
You called to me—turn right!—past the “No Trespassing” sign you’ll die denying exists.
We climbed a grassy hill, spread out six months of witness, formed and reformed other people’s
sentences.
And when you climbed me naked, appearing like a blonde myth, the clouds tore themselves
into strands to crown your head and we made the songs of knowing into songs of innocence:
heaven is in the faces of lovers who answer the call of the wild.

Aarik Danielsen is a writer, journalist and librarian living in Missouri. His work is forthcoming or has appeared in Pleiades, Image Journal, Split Lip, Rain Taxi, Tinderbox Poetry Journal and more. Sometimes he teaches at his alma mater, the Missouri School of Journalism. More often, he travels I-29 to and from Nebraska, where his partner resides.