MICHAEL WASSON on

Richard Siken
Scheherazade

Tell me about the dream where we pull the bodies out of the lake
                                      and dress them in warm clothes again.
         How it was late, and no one could sleep, the horses running
until they forget that they are horses.
                   It’s not like a tree where the roots have to end somewhere,
         it’s more like a song on a policeman’s radio,
                 how we rolled up the carpet so we could dance, and the days
were bright red, and every time we kissed there was another apple
                                                             to slice into pieces.
Look at the light through the windowpane. That means it’s noon, that means
         we’re inconsolable.
                               Tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us.
These, our bodies, possessed by light.
                                                                Tell me we’ll never get used to it.

Michael Wasson is the author of This American Ghost (YesYes Books, 2017), winner of the Vinyl 45 Chapbook Prize. A 2019 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellow and a 2018 Native Arts and Cultures Foundation National Artist Fellow in Literature, he is nimíipuu from the Nez Perce Reservation in Idaho. His most recent collection, Swallowed Light​, was published in 2022 (Copper Canyon Press). He lives in Japan.