Home field sits beneath six obnoxious moons so you know this is another planet. There’s a field in Idaho where sparrows snap their necks by a combination of desire and proximity. This might be hearsay, but I believe it. The field in Idaho is blue, not the shade of anything you could drown in, but like Blue food coloring, which you can drown in if you try hard enough. All this to say, there’s a football field in Idaho where I heard there’s a man whose entire job is to sweep up little foolish deaths. Their field is not my field, but their death might be my desire. By nightfall there’s so much light, there’s barely a sky at all, I love it best this way. If you think I’m the bird in this scenario, you’re right. Note my desperate not-wings, featherless and stark against the not-emerald. The grass is not grass but if you bow, and you will, your knees ache the same. At the edge of the field there’s a school, at the edge of the school there’s a me. In the road between the two I’m barely visible, a feather troubling a lake. Minnesota is full of lakes, Minnesota is full of cabins, Minnesota is full of lakes whose guts run thick with iron, Minnesota is full of things the light doesn’t have the strength to reach. I lead with my head; I feel my neck warn me. Down the middle of me vertebrae groan into a range of hills the breeze cannot climb.  My palms ripped clean of their soft by the iron of an iron bar, fished from a lake by the beak of a machine. I sympathize with the birds, I mistake things for home all the time. I do not look back; I dive into the boy

reckless for this land

I lower my crown     swear

I will die the king of something

IN A RARE MOMENT OF NOSTALGIA MY FATHER REFLECTS ON OBAMA’S FIRST INAUGURATION