Until the Sun Rises

Erika Wurth

She is the woman with the crown of thorns around her neck, pull, pull, lead her,  watch her bleed for you, the red running down, she will be lead in the desert for four days and she will pray with her own blood and will ask for nothing in return but a moment inside your hot brown hands, yes, the same ones that pray around her neck. God, you have to tell me that you know what you are doing because I am the one that watches and waits, I hold the thorns that she has left in my hand, I close my fist, I bleed, I wait for a fist to grow inside her, I wait for the desert to pull back, for the ceremony with pollen to finally make her a woman, so she can take the desert inside her and bring forth the wide, white, blinding sheets of rain, the kind that takes everything into the forces we cannot control, the ones far outside of his hands, the desert and me and into the moment of change, the moment we will all look East, to be born and born and born again.

Erika Wurth
Erika Wurth

Erika T. Wurth is Apache/Chickasaw/Cherokee. Her collection of poetry, Indian Trains was published by the University of New Mexico’s West End Press. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Boulevard, SAIL, AMCRJ, Cedar Hill Review, Fiction, Raven Chronicles, Pembroke, Generation What?, Ellipsis, 5AM, Global City Review, The Bryant Literary Review, Red Ink, Lost Horse Press, Vibrant Grey, Florida Review and Stand. She is a Macondista and has been accepted into the Vermont Studio. She lives in Macomb, Illinois where she teaches Creative writing at Western Illinois University. Recently, she was a visiting writer at the Institute of American Indian Arts.