Sherwin Bitsui

What land have you cast from the blotted-out region of your face? What nation stung by watermarks was filmed out of extinction and brought forth resembling frost? What offspring must jump through the eye of birth to be winked at when covered with brick sweat? What ache piled its planks on the corner pier, now crumbles onto motionless water, sniffed at by forest smoke? What makes this song a string of beads seized by cement cracks when the camera climbs through the basement window—winter clouds coiling through its speckled lens? What season cannot locate an eye in the dark of the sound of the sun gyrating into red ocher after I thought you noticed my language was half wren, half pigeon and, together, we spoke a wing pattern on the wall that was raised to keep “us” out, there where “calling” became “culling,” “distance” distanced, in a mere scrape of enamel on yellow teeth? What father woke, turned over his wife, she didn’t want to, but he pushed until the baby leapt through, now, now, now, strummed into a chorus of burn marks on ceilings where police sirens fruit magpie skulls on trees of monsoon lightning? What, what, what—is how that song chimed in wilderness.

They inherit a packet of earth hear its coins clank in a tin box push them aside reap thick strands of night from thinning black hair. They climb the staircase clenching branches of pens filled with ducks’ blood and follow the butcher’s bed into this room— goose feathers thorning out of their eyes. They promise to never look down again down is just a speck of globe dust just coins clanking in the tin box.

1. The ice hook untwists inside the whirlwind like a tail. A raven’s rib ripped from the electric socket heats the palm, its rusted core bound by the apple’s shaven hide. Like a concussion cushioned between fingertips— egg batter congeals in cracks of concrete. The fourth generation of bees flee the unlocked mouth. The stoplight blinks midway between wing, beak, and worm unwinding inside braided corn husk, pulsing near the foot of the interrogator as he slams the gate shut. The interrogator, Every atom belonging to him, says: You there—hook and worm, you there—carved pebbles tucked under the glacier, your apathy grows like gray hair in these untied shoes. The tundra’s anvil and spine are flung back into the quarried pockets of the pilgrim. The “safe feeling” blossoms next to the caged wren. Motor oil trickles from the harpooned log. The Milky Way backbones the nervous system of the stream the deer sips. This is where I broke the ice, broke the sun’s neck, and the city raised its sunflower above a pond of gathered lice. The storm took care of it! Reached down, hammered them flat. Walls erected, stoned down, down, and as we fled, we unbraided our hair from the fan belt of the exhumed engine. One twin kissed the other in the uncovered wagon. 2. We watched them unravel from their neckties, and took the shape of rain clouds blotting out the noon sun. In their houses— The long night gloved the mist inside our gills. And I stained the plaques clean, memorized each brick flung from the window, while roosters crowed the grip loose. Who made them leap from shelves unnamed? Made them buckle down low, pulled out by their tails from between each lie cupped inside another one? A spear was driven into it— Underneath the pilgrim’s skirt: the skyline of a missing tooth.

When we river, blood fills cracks in bullet shells, oars become fingers scratching windows into dawn, and faces are stirred from mounds of mica. I notice the back isn’t as smooth anymore, the river crests at the moment of blinking; its blood vessels stiffen and spear the drenched coat of flies collecting outside the jaw. Night slows here, the first breath held back, clenched like a tight fist in the arroyo under shattered glass. But we still want to shake the oxygen loose from flypaper, hack its veins, divert its course, and reveal its broken back, the illusion of a broken back.

On limbs of slanted light painted with my mind’s skin color, I step upon black braids, oil-drenched, worming from last month’s orphaned mouth. Winged with burning — I ferry them from my filmed eyes, wheezing. Scalp blood in my footprints — my buckskin pouch filling with photographed sand. No language but its rind crackling in the past tense. • Tearing apart cloud names — pierced fog commands: douse the inferno’s ribs with opaque forgetting; clip dawn from the book’s dusk, unfasten the song’s empty auditorium over a garden of mute foals. Tearing apart fog names — pierced cloud sings: let them shriek from their hinges, let them slice their gills open with flint knives and circle their ghosts as frog-skinned antelope, let them drag their legs over a trail anchored to a ladder that has soaked up blood since land began crawling out of anthills. • Slipping into free fall, we drip-pattern:the somewhere parts, our shoulders dissolving in somewhere mud. The arcing sun whistles across the mask’s abalone brow, its blurring pouts into a forest chirping from a lake’s bite marks stamped vertically on this map’s windowsill. Kneeling our thoughts on ellipses evaporating from ollas of fragrant wet clay — we saddle the drowning’s slippery rim.

When we are out of gas, a headache haloes the roof, darkening the skin of everyone who has a full tank. I was told that the nectar of shoelaces, if squeezed hard enough, turns to water and trickles from the caribou’s snout. A glacier nibbled from its center spiders a story of the Southern Cross, twin brothers dancing in the back room lit with cigarettes break through the drum’s soft skin— There bone faces atlas a grieving century.