Michael Wasson is the author of Self-Portrait with Smeared Centuries and This American Ghost. A winner of the 2017 Adrienne Rich Award for Poetry, he is he is nimíipuu from the Nez Perce Reservation in Idaho.

In a Dream You Saw a Way to Survive & You Were Full of Joy

by Michael Wasson

       A fragment
                                                             of your palm.
             For you have never once betrayed
your god,
                                                                   your thirst.
                    I read the backs of hands like books—
       open them
                                                            in the shadows
             left to ripple the full red edges of my lips.

People on couch
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