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Miriam Bird Greenberg

In the other world we use other words, painting

them with water on the desert’s sidewalk under • unwaver

ing / the / sky’s gaze, meant to be eaten up immediate

ly by our nearest star: we know we’re brief, a flash

of the magnesium bulb’s Lichtenberg lace or

in the hardpan land we inhabit, unwilling / it’s /

to unloosen • Edenic ancestry to us, to unearth / un

couth / the • treasure which lies (we believe) like an ocean

of luminous fish with their wayfinder’s lanterned

faces beneath us, sufficiently gilded to wake the dead

 ’s memory of what they no longer own: a form

for the nation-state to take, to write its penal colony’s

penalties upon, or hold, same as we hold our own

souls, which wager against us as soon as they’re able.