Poem on Behalf
for Bessie
I no longer know
where to begin—
yet here’s the meadowlark
tired from another year
of flight. Its field
shredded in Idaho snow-
fall as today lengthens
toward the hunger
of ghosts. wáwna’-
nim are the last syllables
caught in the back
of my god-
awful throat. Here is
a life, our tiny American
selves I deem bright
as latitláatit, O so tangled
in our childhood of rivers,
of sky—the entire hillside
blossoms our valley
alive, to crush us, dearly
beloved, from a single
November sky back down
to Earth.
ξ
Edit: ________ Removal Policy
If I destroy
my-
self to-
day, does
that make
me A
-merican
enough?
Even more
devoted
than stars
gowned
in blue
smoke?
ξ
A Verb for Being Left in the Light, in the Fire, or What Remains After Everything
Even in daylight, I vanish
like ’ilesqíce. I stare, lips crackled
& cut. My skin a bright ruin
of its lost verbs. O God,
let these floorboards never swallow
me whole. Let this body
blow into birdsong above
the citrus trees, into the shredded
shadows left by the łap, łap, łap I tell
myself to carry. Here, blued
light rims the doorway. & I am calling
a crisis hotline. In this country. I am begging,
I am so sorry. Yes, I am alive. A murderer
of that ghosted period in my head. A boy still plugging holes
in a dream where my father’s skull opens
into a spray of larkspur. My god
is a language I may never trust. Can you hear me
now? I ask her: Can you hold me?
With your voice, please—yes, like that,
like hands opening the windows
of my ribs. & all I remember
then was the dark of early summer
everywhere. My blood-mistaken
fingers an echo of earlier terrors, my torso
a beggar stripped of his teeth. God,
if there is anyone out there beyond
these bone-faced walls, let them lift
today to their tongues. Let them breathe
just a little more. Please. Let every yes
we offer to the ravaged mouths
of our most gorgeous & given
sentences become an opened eye
of tomorrow.
ξ
Michael Wasson is the author of Swallowed Light (Copper Canyon Press, 2022). A 2019 Ruth Lilly & Sargent Dorothy Rosenberg Poetry Fellow and a 2018 NACF National Artist Fellow in Literature, he is nimíipuu from the Nez Perce Reservation in Idaho.