Indwelling I asked you to live in my heart, not knowing what that meant. Every continent has its species and subspecies. Don’t wade into rivers past your hips. Eat this meat, not that. Worms. Vampire butterflies. Later, when I’ve returned home, lifting my daughter over my head or bending to pick up a shoe, I see exploding points of light. The doctor tells me something’s been chewing on my ventricles. Or are you a room of gold? Constructed in the wilderness, veiled from the multitude, moved from century to century, shrouded in smoke and sacrifice, attended by priests in a country no longer on a map. I’m occupied now. Either way, surrounded.
James Fleet Underwood writes about the sacred as it appears in unlikely places: mosquito coil smoke, gecko droppings, mountain passes, a name scratched into a latrine wall. He lives among the rice fields of central Thailand, where devotion sometimes looks a lot like sweeping. His poems have appeared in Tipton Poetry Journal, Porch Lit Mag, Underbelly Press, Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, and Beatnik Cowboy.
