Triage
people we love flew to us to toast us
maps of the coastline were drawn, erased, redrawn
for your hand I would give my hand
red bud trees & a silver surface of light that cuts the darkness
we gather our lives under a common roof
mosquitoes carry the disease back & forth across borders
an airplane over the ceremony cuts back
into the real world, we have opened and entered love
wild describes what the fire does, not what it is
another sliver of ice breaks from ice
if a come cry ascends the throat, if your body silvers me
we empty the earth
here in the long schoolroom of love
after the storm scatters its luminol, you can see what oil butchered
a joy that swallows the body whole
the border wall rises, the droughts dry, the crops burn
is this what dominion feels like?
back in the world’s dull throb
so quiet you’d never noticed
bodies bent down the fields and the grasses and the wildflowers
we’d arrived in the American dream
Isolationism
my daughter curled against my body: small bundle of sleep
or mad attempt to: my husband’s hand on her back: my back:
now that I love my country: it can break me: I knew so little of
our history: tethered to a shallow training: schoolrooms where
yellow pencils lay still: our tongues dumb slabs in our mouths:
we thought it was enough not to be wrong: in those months
of our error: the bodies moldered: the years flickered out: I
chose training in the human not in public records: and: here
she is fierce and furless on my arm: I awoke pinned: I awoke
unmoored: in the history of my country: my friends far away
and childless: I was here in the isolation happiness makes when
we crawl deep enough inside of it: when we make of it a stone
to weigh our sleeping bodies down with: into our lives: forgive me
Sasha West’s first book, Failure and I Bury the Body, won the National Poetry Series and the Texas Institute of Letters First Book of Poetry Award. Her poems have appeared in Kenyon Review Online, West Branch, Copper Nickel, and elsewhere. She is currently working on a manuscript about climate change. She is on the creative writing faculty at St. Edward’s University in Austin, TX.