by Ivars Balkits

Flecked with the images that surround it: post-autumn brown, leaf cling, pale stemmed, blown-out seed fluff. Is someone there? It is like the famous scientific cat. Philosophical cat. Such a fine round tent and meant not to be there. I find it during my fall trek on the property. Guns might be there. Mistaken identity (me for deer) might be there. And an identity that might find itself in town out of place, but does not: “Hi, I did not see you there” having a cigarette outside the bar or chewing your toothpick while pumping gas “because of the camouflage, heh-heh.” Are you on the hunt all the time and what for? Is that like beret and black turtleneck to the anachronistically hip? It is a French term, you know, from camoufleurs, stage designers and make-up artists conscripted during World War I to hide equipment and disguise military intent. Like your tent. Apparently, you want the world to know you are a killer of beasts and, maybe, of the men you regard as beasts. There’s a hint too of the patriotic in wearing it. Of loyalty, truth and holiness… another disguise. We are so differently composed. Possibly, what I am is also opaque to you.

A dual-citizen of Latvia and the USA since 2016, Ivars Balkits lives in a small mountain village in Crete, Greece. His poems and prose have been most recently published by DMQ Review, Poetose, The Palisades Review, ephemeras, Vernacular Journal, Meetinghouse Magazine, Mercurius Magazine, Pnyx (The Ozymandias Project), Otoliths, and Punt Volat.