It was late afternoon, and I could see the village of Olosenga.

Even the medicine man had stopped the eastern sky from becoming a scarlet of rotten fish.

With a total population of twenty-three, all my ceremonial dead had said, Everything you’ve ever talked will haunt.

I could only count the memory of each gypsy moth I had killed, the exact wing sting, the way my mouth struggled for warmth. Struggled to fly sideways at times when listened to but not broken.

The wingspan of a tropicbird must be some immense expanse.

For ten days at ten o’clock, a panacea of human ills presented a great toxicity.

Had I known to expiate the exacting stance.

Had I only thought to live myself clean, dig for root vegetables inside this hat dance or that.

You twirled around more than one recreant fire, calling yourself Duscha and Anitchka.

I died each time your skirt, my darling, hiked daringly above the sinuous crease of your knee.

Breathe me slow or not at all in the glimpsed curls of your lovely damp.

Kill me before the waning fire and wagon dust. My mystical rut, your full gorgeous thigh, this servitude of my spiritual stomping ground in the kerosene rag of your stamped lamp.