MY NAME IS WOLF

when the cold came
I walked into the forest to die
because winter was always the season
I knew how to love

there was once a tribe
that was turned into a river
of blood, the current soaking my feet
until i chose to walk again hidden from the sun.

it seems like so many years ago
that my father told me
one day i would learn to accept
loneliness and that there was a place for me where fruits ripen
on the branches that also hold up the sky
in anger.

there comes a day
when your eyes can no longer
stare at your brother at your sister
burying teeth into their own skin
to find a chance to escape the curse
of their bodies

maybe we don't realize we have
walked away from our lives until
we are standing in snow falling
like childhood and front yards and your
first broken bone

white was always the color of death.

*

in the air
you can't breathe without
shelter, without prison
without another kind
of living.

i am a shadow
over broken terrain
on surface like skin
that taught itself
to heal too much.

on the 13th of this month
they will tell my father
to split open his chest
and watch death arriving

and somewhere across
this country i will
catch a moment
where a yellow flower
braces itself from winter
by opening.

*

i held my arms out in front of me
(the way we practiced in elementary school
before i could even learn this language)
my hands on the shoulders of the kid ahead of me
measuring the distance to keep from each other
arm length, the impossible distance of the air in reaching

the snow then fell remaking my skin
into a winter river a month from thaw
from exposing the heart that has never stopped murmuring
time long ago untracked until we can’t know
whether it’s the fire or the drowning that will greet us

when i was a child father would point at every person
in the room and tell me to learn to identify the ones
that were there to kill me, but now he is small
and full of bread and is only afraid
that i’ll speak too much

this is the forest
that much i know
because my bones remember
how to be scared among the trees

because remember
they gave the history of our skin to jesus
so we would choose to erase our own names

selah

this is where i have come to pretend
these bare branches are shadows of my mother
shuffling across the front yard, the dog close by
following, her gloved hands tending to the rose bushes
that she’d hoped would bloom something more than grief

*

this forest will be the room
with the white walls
in which i could break
like daylight
like silence
like promise

*

is it here, i ask the forest,
where everything changes
where the light touches my heart
in the cold night shifting

and she says, open your mouth
to what you know of as god
there are so many voices
within you that want
to be saved.