Matthew 2:13-23 (Olives)
by Zachary Dankert
A sentence, a central image, my grandmother
wades neck-deep into the Atlantic and watches
without her eyes, words terraces of a temple
leading to Jerusalem’s image. Down the shore
a snowy egret ponders the self she was before
migration, realizes that’s what lightened her enough
to fly, forgetting. Shakti swirls the martini glass. Florida,
because Michigan is too cold, because where else
would she feel childhood on her skin. I’m looking in
the rooting of her, in and out of a place called America.
My grandpa stands smoking on the continent head full
of hunting dogs, eyes trained on his wife in the water
stepping around borders of home, she’ll wait forty days
for his calloused soul to go, watching her Hindu words
like monarchs catch in the pull of saltwater, words she
does not teach her children. There is not an image
attached to the word American, not one true enough
besides this, I am lost without this, the ocean losing
everything in time, these words a prod at the after
image of Yahweh dirty and long-haired from his care
-lessness. I write of my grandmother, “the snowy egret
watches her feathers float away” but then egret-like she
dips, catches a shell in pruned toes, a century
scroll-wrapped (her children, shouting come back to
the shore.) She looks up to extraterrestrial Shiva, I
look up to sleepless ceilings, reducing quiet to a
life’s sentence. Sentence, a life made of parts
all on the verge of being lost.
Zachary Dankert is a writer living on unceded Miami territory known as Indianapolis, IN. Published work can be found in Breakbread Literary Magazine, Tofu Ink Arts Press, and West Trade Review, among others. His goal in life is to write a single funny poem.
