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 plexiglass: our origin salinated.
From Dissolve. Copyright © 2018 by Sherwin Bitsui. Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf of Copper Canyon Press.