JAY SNODGRASS

“MIAMI CIRCLE”

During the excavation of a hotel in Miami, workers found the remains of a Tequesta prayer mound. This halted construction and the high rises
were very angry. The government declared it heritage site and no one
was allowed to build on it. The Tequesta have been extinct since the conquest of Florida, but knock knock, they are rattling the daylight, just a little
like a child’s first words in the darkness.
I went to see it. There were four post holes in the ground. I put my ear to them
heard the sound of wood flayed like fish, it said everything has two names:
falling and birth. And as with any recess the sound of the ocean
wound up creeping into my ear like fingers. After maybe a thousand years, moons
leapfrogging moons, and cloud footsteps overhead, these holes, collecting,
hoarded sky after sky, the voice in the holes reached up to my ear shell
and said get up and bloom, said you are a cloud. The knot of horizons
is moving toward us; the mill of days will turn your bones to power.
Listen: swallow these words to sickness, you are a recess, the dark hole said.

Jay Snodgrass is an Asemic artist and poet. His work has appeared in Diode and Lockjaw and The South Florida Poetry Journal.