Justin Vicari

Native Soil

We’ve all built on sacred burial grounds,
live on top of souls and bones.
You’re drawn to darkness,
memory beneath the skull—
even your “yes” sounded like “no.”

		*

Wrapping the leftover limes in plastic,
I’m reminded
of those little heads
I learned to make by carving
and dehydrating apples—how
they stared from my
grandmother’s sill, pouting shrewdly,
browned by the air.

		*

In the “nice” version we get Manhattan
Island for 24 bucks worth of trinkets and beads—

“beads”
we can all visualize,
the multi-colored the crystal
threaded through hair,
perhaps,

as on a bus one afternoon,
the beads in the girl’s long hair
kept rapping the metal bar
of my seat
with a raining sound
a prayer for rain—

her head not shrunken, but alive,
a force of nature—

		*

Did I love you
only as long as it took to conquer
your rivers and mountains?

You’re divided
as your heritage, between the Native
and the white. The little wizened face
with its squinty scowl—eyeless—
is the true soul of the Golden Delicious,

not the seed-pack at the core
gently shaken out, into new

tall trees.

		*

And there will never be
revolution in America—we just don’t pay our bills,
go under as a protest and join the forced march
of mad, wandering ghosts.

It’s Manifest Destiny,
the pretty faces playing blackjack on Cable.

		*

I don’t know why anything terrible
happens again and again in our history.
Did I love you?

Still laying low, under the snows?
I lost you
somewhere on the information superhighway.

I try to net you back
from backlash, free the enchained
images in my mind.

We’re the great grandchildren of someone’s disease.
Trees, rivers and mountains
bleeding, weeping in the dust.