Michael Wasson

I begin the day like any other day: a decade staring back in the rearview mirror of the wrecked pickup truck: you standing so tall you’re already headless: until I turn around the cornfield blurs into the torn edges of an atlas: pull your hands out from under me to anoint this god- given country of yours: mottled bones singing the anthem of a star- spangled nation: this land given enough time to list its own possibilities: atrocities like a blade of dusk resting on my throat, I bruise: by standing I practice the sacred: & kneel how the body was built toward the bottomless insides of ghosts: the small of my back the sacrum: they say, the five disciples with pocked faces unlike your self-inflicted gunshot but a single entryway: an emptiness full of faith:rise to me as only you would after god has left you with these entrance wounds with no way out: the purpling field that goes on & on: recognizable as a heartbeat: a century- long orbit around a cage of stained glass: broken, you gather me in your image of failed flesh: piecing mirror after mirror back together through the night until nobody forgets: one hundred years of this landscape behind & before us continues to stir — even if the earth under our knees, under every American sky, had been turning west- ward for centuries.

’inept’ipéecwise cilaakt: (I am wanting to) hold a wake / (I am wanting to) hold the body Had this body been made of nothing but its bright skeleton & autumn- blown skin I would shut my eyes into butterfly wings on a mapped earth. Had the gods even their own gods, I could re- learn the very shape of my face in a puddle of sky- colored rain. Extinction is to the hands as the lips are to the first gesture the tongue carves into the slick mouth just before prayer. In every way the world fails to light the soft inner machine & marrow of the bones in motion — I imagine smudging my tongue along a wall like the chest I dare to plunge in- to, the Braille of every node blooming out as if the first day- light of wintered snowfall. This night — like any fleshed boy I dream of a lyre strung with the torn hair of hímiin& in place of my dried mouth — there it is. Whispers in the blue-black dark after c’álalal c’álalal reach out toward my teeth to strum this wilting instrument. & once awake, I’m holding its frame to build a window back in- to the world. Had this body been held after all these years, I would enter you to find my frozen self & touch. Like the gutted animal we take in offering. & live.