ancestors
here I am someplace in this massive shift
do you feel too across history?
you, in the past, are you with me?
——-
in the spirit world things happen
we don’t see
that’s not such a big deal
in Arkansas things happen
we don’t see
——-
spirit world is a term I learned
from a tv show I watched earlier
it doesn’t belong to me or mine
my people lived in mud houses
and died of head colds
if they believed in an afterlife
before the Romans got to them
I can’t name it
——-
my people died of starvation
when the winter or the king
wouldn’t let up
they ate their meat well done
they dug the earth
for potatoes and metals
they lived to be thirty
until they lived to be forty
and so on
it’s magic enough,
this world
be afraid of the woods
haunted
with imagination
——-
and here I am someplace in this massive shift
my world consists of uncompleted missions
bread lines, cars out the parking lot – believe me
when I tell you
beautiful geniuses starve, too
some of my people died
trying to escape
the living ended up here
inside me a thousand generations
of scrappers howling for their gods
living off the fat of the land
waiting for someone to pass the pitcher
waiting for someone to shut the blinds
*
Michael Haeflinger is the author of Low Static Rage (Blue Cactus Press, 2019). He lives in Tacoma, WA where he works for a literary nonprofit that teaches creative writing and printmaking to teens.
