Sasha West
*
Across the convention center floor: beds,
sheets stretched between grey
rails to make a room, room
after room, stretching across
industrial carpeting, a whole city. Woman
curled on a cot in a house dress, man
quieting his sons with
a story, the girl who leaned
into my lap until she was on it, unsure
where her mother was in the flooded city
the buses forced them from. Was
it 2005? Was it 2017? The same
convention center, the same water rising.
My tentative arm around the girl,
I had nothing to give her, she didn't
want my pity, I didn't want
my pity, I had no words for her, I taught
her to draw a horse, breaking
it into shapes, the torso one
long, squared oval, legs
akimbo. Her horse bent its neck to grass,
she had never touched a horse's head,
she told me you blew into the nostrils
softly, softly to calm them.
*
Daughter, you came to in a culture
with just one metaphor. The god sacrificed
his only son. The kings sacrificed daughters
to dragons or a neighboring enemy's bed. Citizens
sacrificed brothers and offspring for the wars, their
land to the toxins for the profits. And we celebrated
with flags, rifles. We taught
each new generation what glory it was
to give your child to the nation's mind.
Breath quickens and flickers. Pregnancy
took my body down to the studs, mass
shootings rang out like a nail gun.
The storms on the screen spin their scythes.
What kind of selfishness calls a body to itself
in carnage? Your legs learn to canter and rear.
My pleasure in you is worn down by the future
or does my pleasure in you wear down the future?
All the draft horses were birthed, drafted to carry coal.
*
If your country drinks down sacrifice, it
can dissolve bodies with sugar for tea, coffee, can
surrender landscape and lungs for coal,
can sell girls to the men with golden
parachutes, throw women over the rails
into the sea to make them goods, shoot
down the man in the field to water the rice,
the cotton with blood—and then around
the bones it can grow a shimmer, sugar that
sifts down a snow globe's snow, the iridescent
peacock sheen on the parking lot oil.
Daughter, you came to, new, on the back
of the Bakken fields, the Permian
Basin, your throat was worth
less than a man's, you'll dig your whole
life and never get down past the full
account of our country's plunder.
*
Heart that grew from the blood
of my heart, born to the raft of my body:
a single gallon of blood in the human body runs
the body,
a single gallon of oil runs the generator.
What our culture longed for,
I longed for.
Pregnancy hollows out
the top of the breasts, the industrial age
will hollow out the mountains,
jellyfish
stretch their barbed shadows
across the sea.