Portrait with Smeared Centuries

I begin the day like any other

day: a decade staring back

in the rearview mirror

of the wrecked pickup truck: you

standing so tall you’re already

headless: until I turn around

the cornfield blurs into the torn

edges of an atlas: pull your hands

out from under me to anoint this god-

given country of yours: mottled bones

singing the anthem of a star-

spangled nation: this land

given enough time to list its own

possibilities: atrocities

like a blade of dusk resting

on my throat, I bruise: by standing

I practice the sacred: & kneel

how the body was built

toward the bottomless insides

of ghosts: the small of my back

the sacrum: they say, the five

disciples with pocked faces

unlike your self-inflicted gunshot

but a single entryway: an emptiness

full of faith: rise to me as only you

would after god has left

you with these entrance wounds

with no way out: the purpling field

that goes on & on: recognizable

as a heartbeat: a century-

long orbit around a cage

of stained glass: broken, you

gather me in your image

of failed flesh: piecing mirror

after mirror back together through

the night until nobody forgets: one

hundred years of this landscape behind

& before us continues to stir — even if

the earth under our knees, under every

American sky, had been turning west-

ward for centuries.