Through dawn’s cracks

Jac McCarty

The light burned down 

there in my parents’ kitchen

It bored into my eyes like a jack knife

like whatever bored into that

poor dead mosquito hawk

eternally ground into the linoleum

and then plastered over for all to see

by some waxy slick shine—

I wonder if that’s how the mummies felt

when we wrestled them out of their

cool dark dry sarcophagi

and wrapped them up in a million LEDs

trapped them in little glass cages

just big enough to immobilize

just clear enough to gawk through

to bring round our tiny thumb-suckers

so they can stand on tiptoe

and count those long-dead teeth

just as I used to squat over that

poor dead mosquito hawk

and rub my tiny dirty fingernails 

over its shine

to see if I could find the crack

between object and objectified.