and dwells here: Lamp-Land.

We touch the ball of light

to one another—: split bodies, desire-knocked

and stroked bright.

Light reshapes my lover’s elbow,

a brass whistle.

I put my mouth there—: mercy-luxed, and come we both

to light. It streams me.

A rush of scorpions—:

fast-light. A lash of breath—:

god-maker.

Light horizons her hip—: springs an ocelot

cut of chalcedony and magnetite.

Hip, limestone and cliffed,

slopes like light into her thigh—: light-box, skin-bound.

Wind shakes the calabash,

disrupts the light to ripple—: light-struck,

then scatter.

This is the war I was born toward, her skin,

its lake-glint. I desire—: I thirst.

To be filled—: light-well.

The light throbs everything, and songs

against her body, girdling the knee bone.

Our bodies—: light-harnessed, light-thrashed.

The bruising—: violet, bilirubin

bloom.

A work of all good yokes—: blood-light—:

to make us think the pain is ours to keep,

light-trapped, lanterned.

That I asked for it. That I own it—:

lightmonger.

I am light now, or on the side of light—:

light-head, light-trophied.

Light-wracked and light-gone.

The sweet maize in fluorescence—: an eruption

of light, or its feast,

from the stalk

of my lover’s throat.

And I, light-eater, light-loving.

Run’n’Gun

I learned to play ball on the rez, on outdoor courts where the sky was our ceiling. Only a tribal kid’s shot has an arc made of sky. We balled in the rez park against a tagged backboard with a chain for a net, where I watched a Hualapai boy from Peach Springs dunk the ball in a pair of flip-flops and slip on the slick concrete to land on his wrist. His radius fractured and ripped up through his skin like a tusk, which didn’t stop him from pumping his other still-beautiful arm into the air and yelling, Yeah, Clyde the Glide, motherfuckers! before some adult sped him off to the emergency room.

I ran games in the abandoned school yard with an eight-foot fence we had to hop, where I tore so many pairs of shorts on the top spikes, and where when my little brother got snagged trying to climb down, my cousin and I let him hang by the waistband of his underwear for an entire game of eleven. And if that cousin hadn’t overdosed on heroin a few years later, he might have proved us right and been the first rez Jump Man.

I got run by my older brother on our slanted driveway, the same brother I write about now, who taught me that there is nothing easy in our desert, who blocked every shot I ever took against him until I was about twelve years old. By then, his addictions had stolen his game, while I found mine.

I learned the game with my brothers and cousins, with my friends and enemies. We had jacked-up shoes and mismatched socks. Our knees were scabbed and we licked our lips chapped. We were small, but we learned to play big enough to beat the bigger, older white kids at the rec center on “The Hill,” which to get to we crossed underneath the I-40 freeway, across the train tracks, and through a big sandy wash.