A LETTER TO YOUR DYING BIRTHPLACE
Embrace the damp fur of home, with lungs perforated
by decay and oak. Bury your face in its mane, feel the
old teeth brushing your hairline. This is your corrupted
hound: a braying half acre of tobacco leaf and wrought
iron ribcage. He is too large for your arms to curl around.
Ride it like the wild sheep until the bell sounds, releasing
yourself back into the soft dust and your mother’s brave
and public embrace. Forget the nomads who once low-
burned the grass to feed the earth, their homesteads west
past the railway tracks. This is the path your cousins took
on the way home from school, now serving as the linear
graveyard for the eldest with body embedded in a metal
mouth. This is the tributary between the high corn and
a supermarket. You could bury yourself into the lungs of
the old beast, the sad hometown hero of mangy hides.
Forget that this all had a future—it was long buried by the
fathers unable to save their coal and bourbon-kiss. You
will never look as good as when you wore overalls, hair
thick with grease like your hometown hound. Despite
sharing its animal body, you will never see how the night
falls behind its canines, the lockjaw of holding on for dear
life. Do try to remember: even the dying will fight until
it is left with a clipped ear and its right eye sewn-closed.
ALMANAC FOR THE RAVAGED SEEDS
here the world is wildly inescapable
its fun-loving fingers dipped in
sunshine with flowers that blossom like your
mother’s scones in the oven everything here
is pristine even in its violence everything
has a place even if it lacks a home
we learn that place
usually means a graveyard more than a front porch
we know it will be years before we
have a backyard that is ours and ours alone except
for the stray cat who chases the birds
we let him stay he reminds us of impermanence
and the obstinate nature of the killer that
we are still hiding from ourselves
so we plant poppies to
create a garden of bloody
seed and petals that guises our worst intentions
in the sweet smell of crushed
bodies that we murder in the fall
and feel no sense of guilt since nothing
could survive our mercy anyways.
SYAN JAY is an agender, Dzil Łigai Si'an N'dee (White Mountain Apache) poet who lives in Boston. You can find them on Twitter @moira__j, or at www.moiraj.com.