SELF–PORTRAIT WITH TORN SHEETS
of music: left to smolder the broken bed
while the body is abandoned
to the dream: bed sheets like a curtain
of smoke: I’m rising like scent
woven into the sweat collected &
smeared over my neck: a blue vein
throbbing like a life-
rope—a way out of the dark: the music
signatures like little locusts
leaping from their blackened thoraces & into
the ark: yes, my one mouth
holds every beast drowning: the last
one living wants so much
to breathe: so breathe, my beast: that music
I’ve torn from the torn page: someone
had always been gasping
for another second
to live: to be built this way
like a cathedral found just after
the flood—in a dripping forest
of warped mirrors.
THIS FAITHFUL PURGE, ON BEHALF OF YOUR HEAVENLY FATHER
As in any day—a war twisted from my teeth: from the tongue
crushed between
that desperate silence of parted lips: the first entrance
to my body: a kiss
telling you: spare me—
please—the soft agony of living
another daybreak swallowed once
again by night: I walk to the field’s
center & open
my palms. I lie down here to face you. Cut off
my hair. Undress: I’m naked
for you: my soon-to-be slick shining skull
revealing gashes
the color of swollen eyes: this body holds its own blood-
washed scalp: as if a prayer
wanted to be so true: as if every one
of its words was the new sky teaching me: this
is already more than a body
could ever handle: so I take my hair—
half a life’s worth of dark & length—
& ignite my dead father’s
last BiC lighter. Because I burn
the field & have, for centuries—
my mouth to worship: for what’s left
is the shape of a boy
like the exiled beast kneeling
before the fire &—without another
sound—disappears.
Michael Wasson is the author of This American Ghost (YesYes Books). The recipient of a 2018 NACF National Artist Fellowship in Literature and the Adrienne Rich Award for Poetry, his poems appear in American Poets, Beloit Poetry Journal, Kenyon Review, Narrative, Poetry, Poetry Northwest, and Best New Poets. He is nimíipuu from the Nez Perce Reservation in Idaho.