IT’S HARD TO SIGNAL MY DISTRESS WITH HANDS AROUND MY NECK IN EVERY DREAM

When they call your number
you’re meant to
                         make a wish:

I want the birds in my dream
to have been eagles
gold & bald &
fighting
               if they must
but just
passing through

I want what they dropped
from grasping claws
into
               the icing lake to have been
small & covered
in
               matted fur instead of hair tangled
like my brother’s girl
or the girl they found
in Kotzebue

I wanted to be on a lake that doesn’t ice
I wanted to be in any other boat
I wanted to remember
                              how to jump
                              how to swim
                              how to remain light

on my feet
I wanted to be primed
                                        to run

All little girls’ hair knows how
to tangle like that
                              like mane
                    or chrysalis—

I want to wake full chested
with lungs large enough to make
                         waves that rise in the desert

I want to be light & to be loud enough
to find you in the dark

THE HEROINE, AMBIVALENT, CONTEMPLATES THE MANNER IN WHICH SHE’LL BE ENTOMBED

It was as natural as anything
the rusted beet
colored automobile
on the lips
of the caldera
filling with water
and a man—
                         brother? father?
                         lover? son
                         I don’t believe
                         in

the trees
or rather
where there should have been
trees and a sky where stars
still burned in agreed hero
cycles

It was natural
she should be named
after a woman or
the disembodied
(by which I mean non
specific but voluptuous
in theory) signified
                         (here signifying the car
                         – or boat or vessel suited to
                         your apocalypse and/or
                         redemption narrative –
                         of course and not the
                         hole, the wound, the lips
                         of split earth, the womb or
                         the cave though as signs go
                         there is the inevitable room
                         for conflation)

It was as natural as anything
the sky too was folding
on itself
atoms looking for a kind
of stability
we’d denied them
smoke with the authority
of rock
still porous
     filling in

It was natural
I should get into that vehicle
when told and trust
the large game stampeding
from the rising water
line would not set me
in motion

The wheels had long since
accepted
we were stuck
outside metal
my body was a dry blade
bent underfoot a map
to where we were inevitable
before

That of course is the problem
with hero cycles
history repeats

I too was a hole in the earth
filling with water
having exhausted
all my fire and rock

I too was fill
to level the field
for sowing

 
Abigail Chabitnoy is the author of How to Dress a Fish (Wesleyan 2019), winner of the 2020 Colorado Book Award for Poetry and shortlisted in the international category of the 2020 Griffin Prize for Poetry, and the chapbook Converging Lines of Light (Flower Press 2021). Her poems have appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Boston Review, Tin House, Gulf Coast, LitHub, and Red Ink, among others. She teaches at the Institute of American Indian Arts low-res MFA in Creative Writing and Lighthouse Writers Workshop in Denver.