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.