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  • From Dissolve
  • Sherwin Bitsui (bio)

To window the past:        slide blurred eyes in.

To door the future:    steam open ice-licked mice skulls,    fling them against walls whitewashed    until thinness surfaces, cooing. [End Page 158]

A field that shivered with a thousand cranes                            evaporates in someone else's backyard.Gills sliced into the mountain's crest      resins hourly.Televised vapor muzzles a hummingbird's gassed lungs.A cliff line wavers                            under a table's August.Shears jangle in the corral's black and white photograph.In the trailer's hallway: the night's unveiled ankles.Rented from a shepherd of doves              we return              replenished with categories.We are husbands to razed hillsides; wives to drowned bridges.When interred in Plexiglas: our origin salinated. [End Page 159] Semicolons coughed out by the final raven                            sizzle the hand's parched memory.Demagnetized moans drizzle magnetic north.Unbelted, we plunge through our closed minds—open palmed.The blowing sand of our faces' tonguesburied in the hovering,the hovering buried twice              and through the cage we swell                            new teeth throbbing in our lungs. [End Page 160] Bison bone sledcrumbles where a sentrypiled feathered torsos                   —lit them on fire.Dog-eared in amnesia:          questions spear what to why.

Knotted to the gun's reflection,              the storm, unknotting—                            the new there                                          thickening in thinning air.

Dimmest below our downward gaze—              these stars gazing              back at us.              How self-indulgent that moon—always looking down. [End Page 161]

Sherwin Bitsui

Sherwin Bitsui (Diné) is the author of the forthcoming Dissolve, and of Flood Song (Copper Canyon Press, 2009) and Shapeshift (University of Arizona Press, 2003). He is of the Bįį'bítóó'nii' Tódi'chii'nii clan and is born for the Tlizilłani' clan. He is from White Cone, Arizona, on the Navajo Reservation. His honors include the 2011 Lannan Literary Fellowship, a Native Arts & Culture Foundation Fellowship for Literature, a PEN Open Book Award, an American Book Award, and a Whiting Writers Award. Bitsui teaches in the MFA program in Creative Writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts.

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