📃 Daily(ish) poem → 00332 ◊ Cell Block on Chena River ◊ dg nanouk okpik
Cell Block on Chena River
First: Brother, remove the tool marks on your scathed skin, brush your tattoos with
nettles, smear bearberry juice in the gashes. Crack open the jail-seed.
Second: Tear away the bars which restrain
your lean, spare life. Bend your curves in a knot. Brother, smudge your
saw-tooth edges.
Third: Cut red seaweed to conceal your gray cadaver;
start wetting your skin down; after scraping,
drip your bowels of blood, change into wolf.
Fourth: The savannah sparrow flies north.
In speech, smell fine-grained hawthorn.
Collapse your voice into bark and howl.
—dg nanouk okpik
—found in corpse whale (2012)