pine ridge reservation

 

the hills white and eloping under a washbasin of sky with a few

ribbons and sinews of clouds, like the half-eroded fossils

of some long extinct and nameless species. snow from

the previous night is spread thinly, with the tallgrass gray

and matted and appearing in patches and the buffalo

standing in the snow, blue and breathing and looking

toward him, and the frostbitten wildflowers squatting in their unpicked

orphanages. you can feel the drums if you press your hand

to the ground and the footsteps and hear the words

unspoken and unwritten and without charter or constitution.

 

 

 

he wakes up in the cold, boneless dawn and he shakes the dreams,

and they fall from him like snow from pineboughs. the window is

cracked and whistling and patched in places with squares of

newspaper, held up to the light like counterfeits, and the headlines

from ten years ago to the day collaged and yellow. when he walks

the bottles around him topple and murmur along the floor,

their rims pursed like a child's lips, sounding out a difficult word

and around back an engine gags to life, flunking, troubled.

 

the moths move sluggishly on the walls of the closet, flinching at the gray light

like shut-ins and the hinges of the doors

recite their names backwards and forwards. old sneakers crunching

on the gravel outside and the hills hipped and lounging and tasteless

like nude women posing. the trailerhomes across the street look

like some abandoned gypsy caravan, blue and red and yellow

and the screen doors wheezing in and out like asthmatic lungs

and in the front yards, the rusty, tireless cars, impotent and sighing and

looking toward the hills, where the gypsies must have gone.

he walks in

 

the snowbanks spread like sickbeds. the sunflowers in the old lots are

ashamed and avoid eye contact, hiding behind their headresses and weeping.

skinny, gray dogs appear and disappear in the light of the morning with their vertebrae

distinct and every bone in their ribcage spoken, their skins tight

around their skeletons like peapods dried and rattling in the sun.

the men and women look to the hills and the cold sneaks through them and one

by one, their pulses separate, like mitotic cells and they live

in different rhythms.

 

you can smell it in their hair, and see it in the way they walk, in the way

they smoke a cigarette. the crust and crumble of the whitest paint, the

bareback moon on their skin, the slow step, the slow shadow. they stand in

their cardboard villages, whittled, whitening, their faces dark and whorled and

formed from hungry nights, like depression glass.

and in the dark breathing plains you can hear the drum

and the voices rising from the dust

like doubt.

Reviews

[Pepsimax]

i could applause my laptop screen after reading that work, very emotional and reaches the quality peaks of writing. 10/10