Can you motivate me? Can I be motivated
across my father’s desert which, though I cannot
see it, must surely have capacities for blood?
Once each year when the cape buffalo traverses
the land toward the last remaining marsh,
where the hunger of the pride awaits, has been
waiting…for weeks with its deprivation…
My father has bled. My father has hungered.
Your father has bled. Your father has hungered.
He was once tied to an umbilical cord.
He was once becoming, as were the lioness
and the muscle and the horn. Before we can speak
our neurons flame away the mists of the mountain,
and there is a homecoming on the plain for the one
or two black-red birds that have made their associations,
traveling atop the buffalo’s back. Can you satiate me?
Can I be sated? Even in the depictions of me,
before I am killed by a wild boar, all my muscles
relaxed by your hand, the dogs at ease, one of the dogs
at ease, the fruit-laden table: dark grapes, blushing
cherries, the lemon peel and pith, cloth on my loin—
decorum. What about the mosaic pavements
in the entryways of the cosmopolitan elites,
before the Christ, the ones depicting beribboned parrots?
A reckoning begins. Counting space and numbering light.
What is allowable by law. What the imagination, once
unencumbered by dreams of farmland and notions of private
property, could see in the rubbing of a little spit and soil
between two or three fingers. Can we say something
about the earliest dream? A high likelihood we are
swimming in it? That the amberlight feels good?
We make for mesmerizing creatures. An orgy of bees.
And we make of suffering something enthralling.
And here is where one might grumble about the we.
I, ok then, I read legislatures as ligatures. I
place on you this crown and this garland of flowers.
I will take the credit and whatever blame for drawing this vulgar fig.
Stay with me now. Breathe with me.
The dream is not the only way in.
It is a hot month and the modern-day kings
are cooling in their water holes, avoiding the self-
annihilation required for the journey.
In another part of the realm, we prepare
for the winter ceremonies. We gather
the stored bladders from seals we killed
throughout the year, inflated with our own breath,
and return them to sea. Spark something
for its smoke. Make your mouth make universal sounds.
Look after your important buildings.
Share the marble bones of your loved ones
with whichever kingdoms of the world remain.
What is that? Whose voice instructs:
excavate, there are gold earrings in that tomb?
Note: The poem’s title is attributable to Lisa Yuskavage.
Issam Zineh is a poet, editor, and public health worker. He is author of Unceded Land (TrioHouse Press, 2022), a Trio House Press Editors’ Selection and finalist for the Housatonic Book Award and Balcones Prize for Poetry. His newest writing appears or is forthcoming in AGNI, Columbia Journal, The Yale Review, Gulf Coast, and Prairie Schooner. He lives on Paskestikweya land. www.issamzineh.com