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.