|
"The Scent of Burning Hair"
I circle my shadow at 5 AM when crickets gather in the doorway showing their teeth and striped tongues silver eyes singing about a wind blown desert sinking into the waist of the setting sun.
I have become a man crawling over his broken fingers searching for a ring to plant my lips on, eating cinders while breaking eggs on my brother's white skin.
I have either become a black dot growing legs running from the blank page, or the mud that is caked over the keyhole of a church hiding its bandaged eyes.
This bed quivers, it wants to become a spider again and sting silent the antelope that leap over children whose mothers abandon their pots and follow hoof prints into the city smudging themselves with the smoke of burning hair. Look! There between the eyes of the horizon two crows waiting for our bodies.
Imagine this at 5 AM, when the river slides into a silent city stuffed with decaying corn husk, when everyone discovers razors in the womb of this land, and the sun decides which bridge should be covered with skin and leaves and which should remain as goat ribs submerged in sand smelling of diesel engines.
—Sherwin Bitsui
|