i.

Butter on the knife, sweet 

on the tongue. We have forgotten 

how to feast, how to be sated. 

Our hunger: a permanent ache.

We are    

constellations, wishbones,     

caught in the hinge of night, waiting

for day to crack us open.            

All winter we dreamed of sweet things: 

persimmons like lanterns, figs split open 

& dripping with honey. But now, 

we have only bitter milk to give our children.

We are left with the memory of sweetness, 

divorced from the thing itself. Our hunger 

a kind of yearning, a desperate kind of prayer.

ii.

The river is a blade. It can cut

or it can drown. We offer it 

our wrists, our ankles, our necks.

When they come for us, we will go quietly.

they offer us root & shoot, salve for the gut 

and what we have left is our silence.

iii

At night we hear the new lords of the land, 

crawling up through the cottonwoods & willows:

a sound like fingernails scraping stone.

I think 

of the river at night, how it sings

to the rocks. I try to remember the names of things:

buckeye, cardinal. But what I see is a blackbird 

caught in a net, its beak opening & closing.

iv.

Winter & we are ghosts, visiting

our own farmsteads. Children's playthings 

left in the snow: rubber balls, metal trucks, 

a porcelain doll with hair of straw. A single red shoe.

In the days leading up to Christmas we find these 

things again, half-buried in drifts,

& it is as if we had never left. As if we are still there.