Crossed
By Michelle Askin



Again I prick a finger on my vine bed in this snowy
Yukon forest and after a dream of you scrawl
with what bled and juice from the compost’s squashed
peach on the green of a birch branch: It was the year
I knew you would come back in my life.
But I can’t finish the poem and those old letters
where you kept asking if I’m in love with you.
Or answer back how I don’t care anymore
if we both were in the same flesh of the fruit temptress.
Your soft ribs were not stolen. I want to be
cradled in them. I want to be cradled.
Instead though, I must sleepwalk, freeze my palm
on this pay phone, inhale the gas station grease,
then hold it in my breath with your words how you found
your Adam in the form of a Russian lover. And
I live with a Russian too in a commune where we thaw
the ill’s urine laundry from the icy lake. He is cruel :
a rapist who won’t touch me but shakes
her underneath where I lay. The sexual fur of her—
I know he has skinned gorgeous swallows and squirrels.
I know—he has wrapped my wrist inside so I feel my ugliness.
For the glow draped over her bones, he has kidnapped
the light beam of this passing bus which wheels laborers
from the reservations to logging camps, where they
will work until the next smoke cloud shaded moon.

Michelle Askin's poems have appeared in Shaking Like A Mountain, Oranges & Sardines, PANK, The Oyez Review, and elsewhere. She currently resides in the Washington D.C metropolitan area.

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