“Wetlands” and “Amulet” – Michigan Quarterly Review

“Wetlands” and “Amulet”

Wetlands

I become a body of leaky edges 
seep out wounds cycle through 
cordgrass spring moonlets and new rings
decked-out each evening    become
estuarine light    a cattail-ed moon 

so many years people poured their
cups into me    tight sutures dissolved 
and soon I spilt stories without 
discernment     my own wet ruin 
breeding grounds for swamp snakes

years back she developed blazing migraines 
allergies to favorite imbibements     I say 
this not to claim she loved me but as evidence 
still waters spill over eventually that
even the driest of season gives way to flood

I give way to water when it calls 
swim deep    in tributaries till they
mirror out darkness    shake loose silt 
low in hips     wash star-song downriver 
through arms’ arterial flow

feel tides rise in bones before rivers 
crest banks     call back 
to some long-misplaced source
a sinkhole in fields now home 
a mishearing of what we hunger for 

Amulet

I ran so fast in dreams I flew
from one place which was a world 
setting to take place from branch bud
blooming crimson emerging from chest. 
Atrophied muscles re-learn sensation 
burn the field down to what remains
rooted dark in deep rot. To be large
enough to hold another continent 
an assortment of characters and scenes
indices of narrative thread seed-stitched
in sinew, to outgrow the smallness of a 
story and compost boggy into new form.
On a star-soaked night I gathered comet-tails,
an advance on prairie grasses and wildflowers 
simmering     my interest in their skeletal remains
kindling to quicken	 ready to burst to flame 
to launch me into eye-searing transit.

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