I AM NOT YOUR MASTER'S THESIS, BITCH.

{a manifesto for Cas}

 

Our scrolls didn't speak to Densmoore, Vescey or Dewdney,
whose raspy and wrinkled voices don't speak to you through
those books you checked out of the library.
They can't crawl through the bark of such young trees.
Ink punctures nothing.

Delicate lines of cut glass hang from my ear
like a shaded tincture of a thunderbird's wing or claw
that whispers and pounds in my voice
when I dilate 68 pages over 16,000 years back to Cahokia.

I rewrote your abstract with threaded sinews of scar tissue near my uncle's sternum;
half a century ago, tears to a Catholic god did nothing to erase the violation of a black
robed windigo priest -- one of a fleet that had stormed west across the continent into
his nightmares he wakes from on Christmas Eve.

I pockmarked your table of contents with every single snowflake that makes a blanket against the
draft of the plywood houses I pass by on the road home with my mother, memories that some
old people still live in, memories like words, like a child who could respond, like a child who asks--

I wiped my ass with your acknowledgments, set it on fire, and covered it in ash.

I redlined your opening remarks with the bloody knuckles of a drunken grandfather
tearing his way through his mother's dead body to gasp in the frozen moons
of blame for her death.

I tore chapter two into little tiny pieces. One for ambulance screeches like clockwork;
one for the way empties clatter together like morse code for "binge"; one for a
new child who appears in our homes with a need as large as our entire village.

I de-gutted section three-point-seven better than anyone has ever butchered a moose on
my Reserve; I gave the meat to the elder that made me a quill box the rest of the world has forgotten,
and saved the brains and my own pissed-as-hell to tan your hide when I see you again.

The conclusion is 16,000 years too short.