How to Abandon Ship

One way: stop pretending your country’s newest mass horror has an end.
Go from boat to life raft directly, as if the sea were lava.

I’m stowing her scattered plastic toys, turning off the glass screens’ shimmer.
Try to collect rain. Don’t drink the ocean. If water’s in short supply, 

eat only sweets from survival rations. Our cooperation brought us here.
One way: say we are homesick inside our homes, two by two.

I’ll grab our ditch kit, start calling this aberration our new normal.
Put on all available waterproof clothing, including gloves and life jacket.

Looking back: what my father’s family stole to land me here.
Looking forward: our straws form lattices in the ocean’s middle.

We live long enough to benefit from the passed-down fire, not long 
enough to feel in our lungs the entire accumulation of smoke. 

One way: Erase the poems of force. Stop filming epics about the glory of power.
Once we could cooperate, we made graveyards dip and rise like the bottom of the sea

My daughter wants just one more princess dress, all the princesses, to hang in 
the closet. Keep warm by huddling bodies together. Not too late for other models

of belonging. Keep dry, especially your feet. Once we could cooperate, we could 
invade and scale-up killing. A pile of bodies can become a set of stairs.

One way: Act calm while the ship sinks. Let danger pulse inside your body. 
If you touch the oil sheen on the water, it will mark you. Your inland

cities will sometimes now be islands. Arrange for lookout watches. 
Use red flares only on the skipper's orders, only when they’ll be seen.

Once we could cooperate. Collect all available flotsam.
Go a safe distance from the sinking vessel. One way is to light the beacon.

How long we together have protected the resources of the rulers.
Note present position. Send out MAYDAY message. Join hands to lay down

our imaginations and manufactured yearnings. Join hands, hold 
like the iceberg’s lattices that can break open the ship’s metal hull.

Storming the Wall

—after Patricia Spears Jones

We stole the hearth back from the screen, made
it again a place of speaking, told each other
stories of the robins’ beaks piercing the yard
to find worms and how those tangled bodies
in their bellies would carry the birds back
through the season to their nests. I kept
trying to tell you there was a map to death 
our culture’s cartographers had drawn, carefully,
adding each century more territory, more bodies—
and I kept trying to tell you in a way that made 
the map mute, so you could hear in the rush
of blood through your own ears how first the stories
must be broken, torn apart, reformed. Child, I came
from the land where coyotes roamed. When they sing
beside your crib, none of their fur will scare you. I ask
you to widen your arms and keep widening. When
machines map the blood through our brains, the same
fire marks what we remember and what we imagine.
I ask: Forge the stories in your own neurons. Then tell
your tongue to make them.

Let Me Sing to You Now

Sasha West’s first book, Failure and I Bury the Body, was a winner of the National Poetry Series and the Texas Institute of Letters First Book of Poetry Award. Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review Online, Crazyhorse, Copper Nickel, and elsewhere. She is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at St. Edward’s University in Austin, TX.