Is the point, your daughter whispers. You are confident
she’s confident of the obtuseness she keeps
from you. You still walk after she wakes.
A million years, then song,
the field pulling stitches from sunlight. In yesterday’s book
the river crashed away from doves.
Now she speaks the book’s undertow. Resurrect me,
Resurrect me. On her phone she learns
To split sound, frost tiny cupcakes, dance
like your lover’s last ghost. The meme
doesn’t say it’s easy to fail at dreamworld success.
The meme says you chaos with your hips.
Outside the book, your daughter leaps out of the car.
Waste nothing more than me, she says. The sail stills as
her body quickens. So you speak to yourself of the desert
and its always pertinent diminishing.
Kaethe Schwehn is the author of the postapocalyptic novel The Rending and the Nest (Bloomsbury) and the poetry collection Tanka & Me (Brain Mill). Her memoir Tailings (Cascade) won a Minnesota Book Award, and she teaches composition and creative writing at Saint Olaf College.
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