1. Inside the rough cloth of our skin, we row toward the oar wet with deer blood and onward to the edge that must be crossed with crosses hammered into it. 2. Knives in here — he said. You will count two in the silences between the gaps of […]
They announced you captive. They nouned you on the television screen. They strung cut ears around their necks and winked from the parade when their horses stood on hind legs absorbing the morning light with blood on their hooves. They picked scabs of dark from cigarette-lit streets siphoned gasoline from walls […]
I haven’t _________, since smoke dried to salt in the lakebed, since crude oil dripped from his parting slogan the milk’s sky behind it, birds chirping from its wig. Strange, how they burrowed into the side of this rock. Strange . . . to think, they “belonged” and stepped through […]
It came whispering in broken English a stutter a twig tweezed from the small of the back. He reached to pull the apple from her mouth. Was it asphyxiation? Should she have leaned away and not let her hair slip through the cracks in the book? Was it just theory? […]
Tonight, I draw a raven’s wing inside a circle measured a half second before it expands into a hand. I wrap its worn grip over our feet […]
Sherwin Bitsui is originally from White Cone, Arizona, on the Navajo Reservation. He is Navajo of the Todich’ii’nii (Bitter Water Clan), born for the Tl’izilani (Many Goats Clan). Currently, he lives in Tucson, Arizona. His first collection of poems, Shapeshift, was published in 2003 by the University of Arizona Press, and his second collection, a […]