Listen to poet Margot Block read “All Night Rider”
All Night Rider
sitting here in an all night rider
breaking heart to journey
a train to somewhere and nowhere
a place I am not sure of but where I will reach
and of the words I left behind
I stay silent
maybe underestimated in blue
the words to say I’m frightened
golden hair in this light is frail
beauty hidden or drowning in spotlight
where the best doe eyes
are threatening to ruin a revolution
time travel is not my first thought
death is
they say I was amazing
at the sixteenth hour
screaming for careful attention
knocking down apathy with a hammer
a kiss on my face
and a hand in my hair
solitary is a hard line in the dark
my public mistakes crumble like clay
now the coolest statuettes are caressed in pieces
I can only say
It took you a few years to break me
now I recall
no one heard death on my lips
and I am captured
familiar with slamming the door and walking out
I am stayed
Margot Block has been writing since the age of fourteen and has been published in Zygote Magazine, Contemporary Verse 2, Juice, the Collective Consciousness, Grub Street Literary Magazine, Cholla Needles, the Black Scat Review, Blank Spaces, Bakwa Magazine, Impspired Magazine, North Dakota Quarterly and the online journals BlazeVox, Kaleidoscope Online, Kritikos: A Journal of Cultural Sound-Text-&-Image, the Blotter Rag, Brief Wilderness, Scissors and Spackle: A-Journal-of-the-Written-Word, Oddball Magazine, the Big Windows Review, the American Diversity Report, Lothlorien Poetry Journal blog, Rusty Truck, Literary Yard, Cajun Mutt Press, Poppy Road Review & Dark Winter Literary Magazine. She participated in the high school mentorship program with the Manitoba Writers Guild, working with Canadian poet, Carol Rose. She won first prize in a poetry contest with the Writers Collective and an honorable mention in a poetry contest with the Lake Winnipeg Writers Group.