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Kenn Peterson Shares his Dream with the Michigan Dogman

By Cameron Witbeck
Poetry•Vol. XXV No. 2 (Summer 2012)

I am an old man in the west of my life.
In my dream, all the birch are stripped bare,
bones piled into walls —
deer skulls, the ribs of men, the hollow
spines of wings. I hang myself
from a tree for three days
to learn the songs of my mishomis
and from my father’s fence of kinsmen
I draw the words to forge. And you,
Wolf-with-Hands, Hunterson, sing
with me. We sing hunger from children,
sing away trolls and wendigos, sing hearts
whole, sing guns silent, sing bones unbroken
and buried in a body. Our voices break.
We dance until I fall. It is a good death.
In my dream, you build a great canoe
for the fire of returning to dust.
From the longhouse of my ancestors, I listen
as you teach the silent earth to sing again.

Cameron Witbeck
Cameron Witbeck is a 24-year-old writer from Michigan. When he isn’t working as an associate poetry editor for Passages North literary magazine or studying in the MFA program at Northern Michigan University, he enjoys hunting and milling about in the woods. His work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Rosebud, Cream City Review, Controlled Burn, Strongverse, and others.

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