front lines

sharon doubiago

“Light fell as only light can
in the north, in Chamschaka,
Siberia, 1912”

Someone read those words today
and tonight someone is slicing lines 
across my shoulders
and down

I’m dreaming being tattooed, the ink
penetrating the opened lines, the blood bubbling up.
“What does this have to do,” I call to two others
crossing the snow, “with light falling in Siberia?”
Wake

in the ice-crystal morning of North Dakota.
Recognize her across the crowd. 
I talked to her last night, the thinnest
razor lines
sliced diagonally down
the white cheek bones
of her magnificent face

Sometimes I am lucky, know
myself here.  My eyes close and
here.  Here.  And you

but when I tell her
I dreamed she was cutting her lines into my shoulders, her face
falls into the old blood, the old
face

from which we are trying to rise