Sasha West

How to Abandon Ship

One way: stop pretending your country’s newest mass horror has an end.
Go from boat to life raft directly, as if the sea were lava.

I’m stowing her scattered plastic toys, turning off the glass screens’ shimmer.
Try to collect rain. Don’t drink the ocean. If water’s in short supply, 

eat only sweets from survival rations. Our cooperation brought us here.
One way: say we are homesick inside our homes, two by two.

I’ll grab our ditch kit, start calling this aberration our new normal.
Put on all available waterproof clothing, including gloves and life jacket.

Looking back: what my father’s family stole to land me here.
Looking forward: our straws form lattices in the ocean’s middle.

We live long enough to benefit from the passed-down fire, not long 
enough to feel in our lungs the entire accumulation of smoke. 

One way: Erase the poems of force. Stop filming epics about the glory of power.
Once we could cooperate, we made graveyards dip and rise like the bottom of the sea

My daughter wants just one more princess dress, all the princesses, to hang in 
the closet. Keep warm by huddling bodies together. Not too late for other models

of belonging. Keep dry, especially your feet. Once we could cooperate, we could 
invade and scale-up killing. A pile of bodies can become a set of stairs.

One way: Act calm while the ship sinks. Let danger pulse inside your body. 
If you touch the oil sheen on the water, it will mark you. Your inland

cities will sometimes now be islands. Arrange for lookout watches. 
Use red flares only on the skipper's orders, only when they’ll be seen.

Once we could cooperate. Collect all available flotsam.
Go a safe distance from the sinking vessel. One way is to light the beacon.

How long we together have protected the resources of the rulers.
Note present position. Send out MAYDAY message. Join hands to lay down

our imaginations and manufactured yearnings. Join hands, hold 
like the iceberg’s lattices that can break open the ship’s metal hull.

Storming the Wall

—after Patricia Spears Jones

We stole the hearth back from the screen, made
it again a place of speaking, told each other
stories of the robins’ beaks piercing the yard
to find worms and how those tangled bodies
in their bellies would carry the birds back
through the season to their nests. I kept
trying to tell you there was a map to death 
our culture’s cartographers had drawn, carefully,
adding each century more territory, more bodies—
and I kept trying to tell you in a way that made 
the map mute, so you could hear in the rush
of blood through your own ears how first the stories
must be broken, torn apart, reformed. Child, I came
from the land where coyotes roamed. When they sing
beside your crib, none of their fur will scare you. I ask
you to widen your arms and keep widening. When
machines map the blood through our brains, the same
fire marks what we remember and what we imagine.
I ask: Forge the stories in your own neurons. Then tell
your tongue to make them.

Let Me Sing to You Now

The artist made the robots to sit and watch: from the art museum, they sat in lines of tall chairs, binoculars raised at the mansions across the lake. Cocktail party: canape and Malbec, river of sparkle and stocks. The museum’s opening in glossies migrated the images across the city. What a pleasure to have the glass lens always turned toward them, gathering the patrons’ life into, surely, beauty. The next week, the robots began to tsk-tsk every time someone appeared. In a window, at the dock, the women heard the little clatter of fingers wagging back and forth, back and forth. The rumors spread: had the artists caged the rich in their own palaces? The doctors called in pills. The CEOs stayed on the phones late into the night. Week three, the robots left their chairs, hid in the grounds, popped up like Whac-a-Mole by the door, keened when the mail order packages arrived, when the AC started its purr. The tiny evacuations started, an unplanned move to the second or third home, the sudden purchase of an island. Wouldn’t you like to know the robots followed them? That AI is unbeatable in peaceful resistance? I know you’re hoping the rich grounded the helicopters and the shareholders ordered them to stop burning the rainforests. Probably, you’re hoping I stop there, before the robot comes to your home while you open the plastic container of food and teach your daughter that kids will tease her when she wears the dress with holes. You want the robot to know the difference between you and a company, you and a villain. The robot has a logarithm, a chess mind, and when you turn your ignition on, the robot hears the language of a single monkey species quieted forever. Half of its binary is a zero. You are the other half, a single tick mark accumulating to a world in the code we made.

Sasha West’s first book, Failure and I Bury the Body, was a winner of the National Poetry Series and the Texas Institute of Letters First Book of Poetry Award. Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review Online, Crazyhorse, Copper Nickel, and elsewhere. She is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at St. Edward’s University in Austin, TX.