I was born with wind locked in my tongue,
a song half-made, half-drowned.
Midwife said the cord
was coiled like a small river,
tight around my neck.
I came out blue,
gasping like a fish drug ashore.
They rubbed me with cedar ash,
cut the water’s leash,
and the first sound I made
wasn’t a cry,
but something lower—
like the hum of current under thaw.

I used to sing in the register of weather.
Pam laughed, said I was a castrati in another life.
No, Pam. I was a horsewoman
in the valley where the river
bends around the bones of our ancestors.
I carried **-Chunk children to school,
Dakota women to the trading post,
men drunk on corn mash and thunder.
I wove baskets from river reeds-
lightning stitched through darker bands
to mimic the storms over Spirit Lake.
At night we sang the Bird Songs,
those long traveling prayers
that teach the heart where home is.
When the soldiers came,
we hid in the limestone caves
and sang quieter.

Songs don’t die,
they just change their address.

When the city hums too loud,
I hear the buried river-
its pulse through pipes
asking if I remember.
I do.
I remember the small fires
inside my ribs,
how silence can be a kind of singing,
how grief is water looking for its mouth.
I walk to the lip of light’s forgetting,
half prayer, half river,
the river speaks through me-
blue, unbroken, home.

I met her in the shelter-
sunset bleeding through curtains
thin as onion skin,
coffee breath, rising like a ghost,
a scarf at her throat knotted like a girl.

She said she wanted to die on that white floor.
Cheek pressed to porcelain,
her skull pictured cracking like cheap tile,
the vision circling her the way buzzards
circle a broken dog.

Glass sang through her apartment,
kitchen, hallway,
the sound of promise cracking its teeth.
She described the river of wine
creeping slow down a yellow wall,
apples rolling like lies
across the crooked floor.

Her wrist, she said, had no language then:
fingers slack, neck loose as an unlaced shoe.
She clawed for a phone perched on the sink-
nails on plastic - the phone’s arc, plunk - silence.
The world went out like a dropped bulb.

He flung their wedding flutes,
cards still tied: To a bright future. Much love.
He punched plaster until his knuckles bled.
She woke to the sound of him naming the room,
as if syllables could stake a claim.

“Take me home,” she whispered,
sick with sleep, sick with forgetting,
and the woman in me,
who knows the floor of grief,
leaned down in that wreckage
and braided her hair with dust.

She folded the scarf, smoothed her boots.
I could see what home had taught her:
to make herself small, to learn the shapes of staying.
I listened like a ledger, tallying bruises,
balancing bowls of soup.

In the margin of my ledger I wrote her name,
a balance carried forward.

Burning fuel but not to leave,
boys circled town, came back
to the station where they began.

Gas exhaust drifted like spirits
above asphalt, dissolving in the night.

Girls stayed in the lot,
waiting for men old enough
to buy liquor, their names
claiming the land-
long after other names lay
buried in the ground.

They kept to the faces,
legs folded on hoods,
lip gloss catching the station lights,
bracelets chiming, hair flips rehearsed,
laughing at trucks circling back.
They wanted to be chosen, and I tried
to want that too- tried to be a girl among girls,
waiting for the moment some hand
would tug me out of the circle.

But my eyes kept straying-
across the street,
to the rise that was not just dirt
but a chest under earth,
ribs shifting,
a hum curling into my throat.
Something skeletal in its patience,
as if Baykok himself
were sharpening arrows in the dark,
waiting for breath to break.
Built long before us by Ojibwe,
still honored as sacred ground.

The others smoked, struck sparks,
sequins spilling from careless wrists,
never thinking how easily flame
might travel down, through us,
into what we couldn’t see.
I could hear bones shifting,
a buried drumbeat, the land’s own warning.

Every glance of the mound
pulled me back into silence.
It told me what the others
didn’t want to know-
that all this circling, waiting,
was only the lid of a grave.

I could have gone to the cemetery,
or back to my high school lab,
find him lecturing from a podium,
bony finger raised,
demagogue of the dead.
I could break him down piece by piece,
cram him in a duffle,
a femur jutting the zipper.
Ignore the groan-
Skeletons are
by nature
never satisfied.

Instead I found myself
in the carnival lot,
The dog was long dead,
the sign kept guard.
Rusty rides slouched like tumbleweeds.
Cotton candy in memory-
blue tack crunching my teeth.
Lewd.

Skeletons fixed on poles,
spiked up through pelvis and spine.
Use ****.
Grip shoulders. twist. lift.
When one slid free,
he collapsed into my arms
all bone-light, lovely,
mine at last.

I just brought him home.
Sat at the kitchen table.
Named him Curly.
Zoom howled: WAG’s gone weird!
What’s his name? What’s his name?

His name is Curly,
I said, but I knew
his name was You.

We drink wine by the pool.
He never sips.
Sometimes I pour a second glass for the glint.
Sometimes he tells me Danny Elfman
wants to play his ribs like a xylophone.
Sometimes he sighs,
he hates Oingo Boingo.
I laugh. Obliging.
So do I.

When the wind kicks up
he smells of sugar and rust.
Sometimes he rattles the glassware.
Sometimes he won’t sit still.
Skeletons are
by nature
never satisfied.

Jenny Mechanical is too mecha for the main house
but too human for the tool shed.
She can turn stripped screws, whip up a perfect grilled cheese,
provide power during an outage and mow and mulch while she's at it.
She also dreams of a recharging kiss and poems appear at her fingertips.

Jenny had a little lamb whose fleece was made of synthetic polymer
and everywhere that Jenny went, the lamb was sure to follow her.

See Jenny Mechanical, stopped in the middle of the front yard,
telling her lamb to look at the new leaves with its LED eyes.
She has always been a perfectly average 5 foot 3, can open any jar, pick any lock,
but she is leaking into its faux wool because of something beyond utility.

Jenny Mechanical can eat no fat, nor either any lean
and yet between the two of them she knows her grease from cream.

Still, as Jenny could tell you, mere maintenance is not love
and the poems at her fingertips have diverged from factory settings,
glowing pink
then rose
then lavender
then blue
then indigo
to create from refraction a lovely illusion, a rainbow or so it seems.
___