two poems

By Michael Wasson

Volume Two, Issue Two, “Senses,” Poetry

WHEN [OUR] LIPS & SKIN REMEMBER [ERASURE]*

 

Return, take me,

beloved —

the body’s

memory awake,

resurges in blood;

when the lips

& hands are touching again

in the night,

lips,

the skin

remember

 páaytoqsa, 

 heté’ew— 

cilakátnim

tim’íipnit pipe’tít híikus,

 kikétki xuyyíi hikúuse; 

kakáa héenek’e him’

kaa ‘ípsus hitukéepsuksix 

cikéetpe,

him’, 

táalp

hitmíipn’isix

*This is an erasure piece of the poem “Return” by C.P. Cavafy, translated by Rae Dalven.

 

LET THE TERMS DICTATE AS SUCH

All I ever wanted 

was to be deemed 

possible. & I was. 

Our leaves fallen 

from every heavy 

day of autumn. 

My father & his 

kisses in the earth 

in the sky & no 

where between— 

my lips smashed 

against my lovers 

thighs & a mid 

night that may 

never end—death 

arrives some 

days here as I 

speak of him joyous 

at the edge of 

a brightened field: 

flesh returning 

the human in me 

now thinning in 

to a single shard  

of dawn: I prime 

its pearl in my mouth,

cocked, ever faith

ful & hereby civil, 

melting sweet, sweet

America between 

my teeth.


Michael Wasson is the author of Swallowed Light (Copper Canyon Press, 2022). A 2019 Ruth Lilly & Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellow and a 2018 NACF National Artist Fellow in Literature, he is from the Nez Perce Reservation in Idaho.