k i i k a r a k i - k a w a g u c h i

carrion
	That I will be a destroyer of birds Birds fed no voice Birds by wings tongue-painted back by glue Birds soaking in sacks slung on rafters Wrung tongues running slack flapping against pinning blade and wing blade Sacks dripping from rafters like gassed canisters of moth-snuffed sight Birds been born of no teeth Must I chew their voice and give it back like a mother Must that I would feed the angels gruel from my lips Feed them my lips by poor imitation of their voice I have plucked flight from the angel’s gruesome body I have painted the rafters by the angel’s flight For the roof might rise and carry by their song
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tin dragon
	welcome the cliff saying, the salt off my eyelash weighs over the heavens a ship of manic snow to fall from a great distance is to draw this house around yourself like a ribbon or a casket there are raisins there is honey there are boughs of rosemary and dill loaves of spelt bread pelt the roof of your tomb you smell none of it you are face down your snout is shot through with the fog-drenched earth with rust and clay you can see into Persephone’s bed chamber she is undressing a necklace of pomegranate seeds sways at her bare nipples you would call to her but your tongue swells in your jaws like an overripe mussel your head feels packt with cloves, soaked rags it must be winter somewhere you are just a hoofprint chafing under the force of another hoofprint somewhere every hoofprint is delivered to the dead as a presence somewhere in your absence a cricket is lapping up the snow your name and any name can be buried under the salt of my tongue
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KIIK A.K. is a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley and Santa Clara University. He earned an MA from UC Davis where his poetics thesis was titled “THE JOY OF HUMAN SACRIFICE.” He is a current graduate student of creative writing at UC San Diego. The pieces included here were written for the poet Alan B. Williamson.

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