Naturalization

There was occupation, a market for tracing, clouded October and open fire; there was text flattened into macabre telescope, an orchestra of stolen petrified skulls, tombs made civic; there was hand-drawn cattle splayed in spectrums of gray; there was afterword — New World Order of sunsets, a sugar plantation and a French slave master’s son; there was a fixation of birds; there was a hobby of arranging murdered muses with wire to be painted exactly like this; there was a book of the dead named Birds of America, an incident of canon; there was grove air; there was turpentine, orange and harvest and piles and piles of indentured coiling; there was Syrian Christians petitioning against Yellow to better own houses; there was stacks of pledges and dictionaries without song, a refugee crisis and a father with a flag pin; there was a daughter and her pages of class mobility; there was hours of wrists and balconies and inadequate protest; there was an inquiry into how the green lawn occurred; there was a poet trying to retrace a book of the dead; she entered many cities portending a crow in spring, wearing a dress glimmering of sweatshops; she asked the tarot reader in New Orleans for clues: “The corpses in you are damaged, but they have a lot to say.”