Transplant: After Georgia O’Keeffe’s Pelvis IV, 1944

for that 26 year-old in Florida

 

God left before volt of black feathers descended

Buzzards left before wolves routed home with a rib

 

Inside their den, regurgitation of skeleton, and then another

Because wolves have two stomachs, I only have one

 

There is quiet now in the hospital room

Ventilator’s tail pulled from electrical socket

 

Your parents weep a lake. A sky and moon, too

They weep a pelvis, a painting. It hangs in a museum

 

I steal your hip bone, tuck it deep inside my pocket

Where else does a love note fit if not next to a groin

 

O, solitude. O, white-winged moth, I masquerade

My left eye blue nests a moon, I disguise myself from God

 

His messengers in black robes picking for a kidney

Your mother writes He never met a stranger

 

O’Keeffe finds herself in the desert, a transplant

Long after the buzzards and wolves have left

 

I ingest dissolvable moons so that we stay strangers

Two skeletons of different stomachs:

 

One lost in the desert, the other a planet, a god

A wolf swallows his own rib to rebuild us all

 
 
 

b: william bearhart is a direct descendent of the St. Croix Chippewa Indians of Wisconsin, an MFA candidate in the Lo Rez program at the Institute of American Indian Arts, and currently works as a poker dealer when not writing or editing. His work appears or is forthcoming in Cream City Review, North American Review, PANK, Plume, Prairie Schooner, and Tupelo Quarterly among others.