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.