Manifest
- Manifest
Once a week natives visit us onshore,red kernels mounding in their fingers,
small seeds they drive into the groundwith one thumb until they sprout up green again.
I try to capture them, pen the menonto parchment, but each entry feels vaguer
than the last. Yesterday, I trapped a fishand skinned it whole. No time here to blade
the body down, bones burring the catcheven as it blisters in fire. When we eat we pick
them carefully, the little needles that cutagainst sweet pink flesh. [End Page 327]
Kara van de Graaf is a doctoral student in creative writing at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Best New Poets, Mid-American Review, and Alaska Quarterly Review. She is a poetry editor for cream city review.
