I found myself in anothers eyes.
Reflecting all my wants and why's.
By our hearts beats a universe.
Our love to give and not rehears.
Through our eyes I saw myself
In all my sickness and in health.
For all my truth and selfworth..
Conected being with life on Earth.
This love I feel gives all meaning.
Building real; made in dreaming.

Indeed, a bright white light approaches this shredded heart.
Could it truely be time so soon?
Perhaps a lucid dream with which my mind attemts to ****** my every thought but a fight successfully brought.

Not a dream I see...
A room drained of color, and a body fragile conected to the only source of survival.
Have I really met the end?
Could I possibly be looking at my future crumble.

It appears so...
The reflection of my lack of sanity so clear upon the tear drop of that loved one.
The only loved one.
The one worth taking bullets for every ounce of my body.

-Kathia Mariana Landeros

As we walk the blazing black asphalt,
manicured and graded for modern passage,
we can scarcely imagine these same footsteps,
trod by General McClellan and traversed
by the very fugitives that he fought to free.

The civil peace was broken when the machinery came,
ripping railroad ties and spikes from her gut,
erasing and smothering the Confederate footsteps,
gentrifying the mud for our convenience,
replaced by the smooth tar of unification.

This new Mason-Dixon did not divide peoples;
it conected communities.

Now on our bikes we don our spandex and lycra in Alexandria -
no shoveling of coal for this engine -
with a sip of our energy elixir,
whizzing over the Sycolin bridge and past Tuscarora Creek,
quickly turning around in Purcellville for the return trip.