Optilurza

Four in the morning.
Lightning slithers
through  pencil-gray clouds.
 
Across the red brick courtyard
a guy in a white hardhat,
and an orange safety vest
spreads plastic sheets
over an oversize window
where a tv flickers.
 
Silent, a UFO glides through
the clouds. Will, my Hopi bro
says in his distinctive
way, “Yeaaaah.”
 
He can’t see,
but knows aliens are out there,
both of us trapped in our
Procrustean beds in
that placeless place,
Optilurza Infirmary,
with our swollen, broken legs
on our backs unable to move.
 
Soon they’ll come to drain
our blood away, but we
will float out of our
busted-up bodies, escape,
and fly away to Oraibi,
that place on the mesa
far from here
we both yearn for
where Will’s family feeds
us sweetcakes.
There will be laughter.
 
“Yeaaah,” Will says.
The Kachinas will come up
out of the earth to take us to
the next world.