Tacey M. Atsitty

The Warbler

I.

It’s mostly soft nothings:/ when the water cup/ is just beyond my reach/ I’ll stand down here, where/the warble begins to trail/ and imitate wrens, how/ they vary their throats: white/ into calf love like dust/ storms pulled out of the chest/ a slow swell of the ear/ until entrails just stop—/ / Then dissonance altogether/ like a hard landing into a canyon/ nest or the splat of white/ and deep green matter/ /against the bottom of a canyon/ wall, like adjusting frequencies—

II.

thank you for running
to the driveway’s end
to trill even the faintest
of tunes a baby wren
these days it’s difficult
for me to switch off
the radio the only place
I’m comfortable in
is silence, is when I sing
to open land you
helped me by saying
I didn’t love anywhere,
even though it was pretty
for a time; it could never
fully echo, and that’s why
I could only warble, click
my tongue: a falling
that didn’t lick anything
the phrase had already gone
stale with me. I’d rather
everyone else go sour
instead of them knowing
how I truly—
it’s expanse
of sky here, a clearing
of blue, replete with thought
the canyon wrens, see them
unravel their throat

III.

And so I’ll straighten everything to whistle.

It does matter, angles cut into a greater cascade

in the splat, it’s not: you I love.

It’s the song’s whole ending

whole bottom lip— how it’s come to quiver so.

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Tacey M. Atsitty, Diné, is Sleep Rock People and born for Tangle People. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Cornell University and has won several awards. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry magazine, Kenyon Review Online, Prairie Schooner, Crazyhorse, New Poets of Native Nations, and other publications. Her first book is Rain Scald (University of New Mexico Press, 2018).