“Ain’t such a thing
as a lynx
—not even bobcat
kin out here in East Jesus,
PA,” says Tommy Rico.
Quarrel smokes
above our fire pit,
and the Old One’s lawn chair
sinks another half inch
into muck and gravel
clods. “My father told
of a wandering
lynx,” he says, “And now…
we have all seen
the end of its wandering.”
True, we had all heard
and maybe even seen,
but it’s me wandering
down into this gully—
dawn’s placenta dribbling,
runny over Kittatinny
mountain heads—
me and my
little fingers
clutching a wide-mouthed
pail of gasoline.
My nostrils plugged
with cotton,
My lips light pink
beneath black
Harley-Davidson bandanna,
six matches
lined in the elastic band
of my favorite underwear,
is all it should take,
they’d said.
“The lynx spirit
cannot wound the pure
heart of a boy,”
they’d agreed.
And again, I was offered up,
sacrificed,
on the altar
of my father’s pride.
I splay out
my legs, hairless—and careful
not to disturb even a shrub
sloping—into a hollow
of the creek’s left nostril.
My sneakers slide
across constellations
of dew shimmer,
sometimes tangled
in thickets of hairy earth.
I look up
from careful footing
and offer my chin
against lobes of purpling light.
Dawn outlines the lithe
silhouette of a man belly
down, unnatural,
as if he’d come
exhausted from between
hips of the creek’s feeble
current—shoreside
he lies chin propped
upon a stone,
as if he would sip at
one more cup of air,
as if he would face
the eyes of his unmaker.
A billion gnats discuss
who will suck the sweat
from the cheesecloth
of my white tee.
Even the peach fuzz
of my small belly stands
straight with fear.
But, I slosh the gasoline.
I ladle the whisper of match glow.
I wonder if he will
speak to me:
the voice of an old god
beneath the work of my hands.
Benjamín Naka-Hasebe Kingsley belongs to the Onondaga Nation. He is the author of Not Your Mama’s Melting Pot (Nebraska), Colonize Me (Saturnalia), and Demos (Milkweed) and recipient of fellowships from Provincetown, Kundiman, and the Gilman School, among others.
