sweetened by the thorn.

The tumbleweed turns and turns,

until it bursts free all its spores into the wind,

until it is only what it might become.

There is no such thing as time or June,

only what you’re born into—

only waiting for the rain, for the flood,

for what erupts my badlands and my tired eyes in beauty—

Mojave aster, desert globemallow,

where once was terrible nothing.

There is no god here in these flesh-hours,

though your jaw is a temple and your hips

strike like an axe—

the labrys I injure myself against.

But you called to here by me come softly,

into the bull-noon of my body—

and not unknowingly.

You’ve heard me churn and lather, yet knock and enter.

Together we are the color of magnets,

and also their doing. Manganese, lodestone,

ores the light will not touch, so we touch the light—

give it to one another

until we are riddled and leaking with it.

What else can we prostrate

or set before the large feet of our creators

if not the diminishment of the body—this Book of Scars.

Sand grinds like gears between my teeth—

sparkling, small machinery of want.

What question can I ask of the thing I am?

All I have done and failed to do.

The furrows I tear with my grief-mouth, a map of myself

carved by my own horns.

I have a name, yet no one who will say it not roughly.

I am your Native,

and this is my American labyrinth.

Here I am, at your thighs—lilac-lit pools of ablution.

Take my body and make of it—

a Nation, a confession.

Through you even I can be clean.

It Was the Animals

Today my brother brought over a piece of the ark

wrapped in a white plastic grocery bag.

He set the bag on my dining table, unknotted it,

peeled it away, revealing a foot-long fracture of wood.

He took a step back and gestured toward it

with his arms and open palms—

It’s the ark, he said.

You mean Noah’s ark? I asked.

What other ark is there? he answered.

Read the inscription, he told me.

It tells what’s going to happen at the end.

What end? I wanted to know.

He laughed, What do you mean, ‘What end?’

The end end.

Then he lifted it out. The plastic bag rattled.

His fingers were silkened by pipe blisters.

He held the jagged piece of wood so gently.

I had forgotten my brother could be gentle.

He set it on the table the way people on television

set things when they’re afraid those things might blow up

or go off—he set it right next to my empty coffee cup.

It was no ark—

it was the broken end of a picture frame

with a floral design carved into its surface.

He put his head in his hands—

I shouldn’t show you this—

God, why did I show her this?

It’s ancient—O, God,

this is so old.

Fine, I gave in. Where did you get it?