Four Snakes Makes Our Flag
Said swallowtail and we butterflied. Said
there’s nothing to fight for and all the guns broke.
Said smoke. Motor finally broke down.
Needed a plural for river, needed
riven. You look just like your mother when evening lets on. In the
beginning, the Volkswagen was a bloodrust splotch,
a smear in the river, a heart half-buried. And in the
beginning was a barn full of horses kicking it down.
Said barn and the birds had somewhere to throw
their shadows. Said beauty and our mothers
smoked like movie stars, our daddies whiskey-
darkened, bruise-giving. In the beginning,
a man said I love you but the river didn’t know how
to take that. By the time they found him he was something else.
Four Snakes Makes Our Flag
I was made a son but then slipped into
a song true there’s no language for
grief but there is a rhythm—paradise
all past tense that’s why we move through it
singing how humid please baby stop the car—
I caught my shadow stitching a new flag
to bury me beneath I’ve been trying to listen
for one true thing about faith and I guess that’s
my favorite thing about steeples
how they put the dark where the dark
should be already I’m making this something
it’s not—how else to understand the hole
a man digs but as a mouth and he its tired
tongue see thunder wrapping his wreathly shoulders
Four Snakes Makes Our Flag
strange to start this way I know all down the boy
sawtoothed scars a morning still + yes honeysuckled
don’t you move, flowerpot (don’t you blink, twinkle
light) we could be so harmless let all heartwrenching
in the bloodlight stop + let all spins be dizzying
why come all this way and not become something
else entirely it’s a weed called everlasting
swallow it here’s heather and larkspur one gray cloud
low like tea steeping + looking up at that sky you
said Jesus wept but who hasn’t this was before
the sawblade before the hush, but even then I could see it
strange the acoustics
of memory take me home
you said the long way
C.T. Salazar is a Latinx poet and librarian from Mississippi. His debut full-length, Headless John the Baptist Hitchhiking, is forthcoming from Acre Books in 2022. He’s the author of three chapbooks, and the 2020 recipient of the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award in poetry. His poems have appeared in the Rumpus, the Cincinnati Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Denver Quarterly, 32 Poems, Rhino, and elsewhere.
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