Hunt
BY JANAN ALEXANDRA
Rain who fills our mouths with sky-seed sharp & quick,
thick velvet filling rows of fresh & loosened dirt,
pools of red mud for the rearing worm and scuttle-foot beetle.
We held this insect life in the blue bowl of our hands,
rinsed our skin in the river, let the ice-spring run warm
and orange with our hearty rust, our maroon soft livers.
What does the river remember, the stream that bore us?
Our eyes carry our faces with no sense of the before,
just a roving & combing—how to go & how to go back.
Did we cross water sucking at the seasway with our teeth,
did we move in the slow muscle of mountains, wind lifting our heels?
We hunt by night, frisk the earth for some laden trove to eat from,
some smoked fire to burn off our questions in feathered ash.
Under stone-lit skies we roam the rounding wide brain,
scrape the insides of our eyes clean, gather & fold our silk,
count our gold coins & jewelry, press butter between our palms,
proof that we are well-fed. Language threads our ears needle to drum,
words tonguing our memory, drawing out lengths of river-map, fish bones,
wet grit of where we have been, the names of ancestors whom we know,
whom we do not know, the living and once-lived, slow rain who keeps
filling our mouths, we are collecting you drop by drop.
