Poetry

or that I was born on ceremonial land / because the shitty out-of-state off rez free healthcare /
made my body a cavity. . . .

My student writes, Time is a blend of space / and time. What he means is that, to be / thunderstruck, you must jiggle the antenna / that draws down lightning.

The map seems near enough / to infinite hours of terrain // dunes and glaciers and grasslands / the mountains the badlands // the scablands and ruins / the islets the bogs // how many days roaming from my couch. . .

it was hunger. not the lust i imagined. / or the wasted no-shame howl. you sang.

Almost morning, she sings with her sister who says she never visits enough. / I want her like this, a little drunk, laughing. Ay. / My father didn’t sleep last night. He pictured her / hidden in the folds of her apron.

When a rose, a shrub, a tree / looks dead in spring, the policy / I follow is my mother’s Let it be.

Not dead, not beautiful, not afire, / this bush—so, no God. No alarms, either. / In the heat its blooms hang like rags, tired / as Mary’s first Christmas.

Welling. Seeping. Dashes to cover / of cattails, reed-fringe, open woods, / grass-grown-over logging roads, / leaving rags and strings of DNA. . . .