Boy of Lightning, Girl of Fire

We kiss and there’s a shock

like rain on a supermarket cart.

The mountain cries light

when he plays his guitar thunderstorms.

He was born where the tornadoes

were so bad that Bill Clinton

had to come to the rez

to apologize. His daddy remembers it 

on the radio when he’s born,

in the IHS delivery room.

When I’m brought into the world,

there is a flood. Red

Running into Water. Outside,

in the sun, the mines still cough

uranium into the slickrock and silt. 

My mother’s lips widen for breath

when I slide out in the delivery room,

nameless but full of flame.

surviving a breakup, old Indian style

My best friend’s crystals collect light by her windowsill.

My stone of choice is turquoise. A teardrop, a shield,

small god. It sits on my wrist 

at approximately the same temperature 

as my mama’s hands, 

when I’m sick. I write, They were always

so cool, like water. I write, because

I hurt. I hurt, so I am sick. Answer strewn

in pebbles cuz I’m too old for crying

at the table and I’ve asked Creator 

one too many times

to smite me where I stand. My bad.

I get up and out of bed.

I leave my face bare. 

I don’t wear jewelry,

except when my mother asks

where my turquoise is/ if I wear it,

and I remember the cuff

on my wrist.

It never feels like a chore,

but feeding myself does. 

I am drawn to water, nowadays.

It is so much a part of me,

the stone must have found its way

to my most secret of hearts. 

I drink, slowly.

I dream of rain.

My eyes collect light that gathers

and falls. It becomes me.

The showers of tumbling stars.

An Altar for Lost Girls

This young, you don’t think of your mother. 

You slam doors on their hearts.

They leave dinner cold but the lights still on. 

Every pair of shoe you wear is suicide. A monument

to the end of the world. Not much to it 

when it’s everywhere, the last time 

your mother cried. You dream high,

and an auntie’s hair grows back.

The cowboy responsible gets his ass

clipped in Santa Fe. And every father

comes home, though the bad ones

get their shit rocked. In this language, 

lost girls are messengers from God.

We went to church, and it’s the parking lot

they found last summer’s body. Where we smoked

weed and boys watched from their cars. Our pleas

were answered, but it was just a line

of women coming home. An ocean

of arms waiting there to catch them.

Song for the black cat outside my mother's apartment

We know what it is to not be wanted,

when our bodies are taboo.

Night limbs, how our eyes 

swallow everything

When I was brought into the world,

I looked back.

The trees were heavy with dark.

They say a wicked woman walks

bad luck. What makes a wicked woman?

Irises green with want, barbed tongues

to catch what's coming.

I want to move through the trees

as you do: four palms flush to the earth,

dark river with two wild torches 

in a corner: living shadow, the same color

as forgetting.

How many lives

can I hold in each chamber

of my heart?

everything is weird in the NE because there are no NDN monuments or memorials, only NDN names

The marsh islands with their little tufted backs

Someone’s home, 

everywhere is always someone’s home

Late sun fills the window of the Amtrak N.E.

Mouths open in the trees, in the mud

When our bones are found 

it’s called a haunting

Where do the birds go? Who 

gets a funeral? Everything is a burial 

ground, even the sky. 

In the old ways, this was someone’s back,

The constellations bulletholes straight through

his stomach

Blasted with light—

How many NDNs must die here

 for anyone to know? 

The train babbles on about everything

else. I don’t want 

to talk about the land so much– 

I don’t wanna eco-NDN,

But the marsh grasses 

look like the most loved and lonely 

parts of my body 

Where do songs go when it is dark? 

What names 

moved through these trees,

The soft now-grass

The underbellies of the leaves

You survive the end of the world in Kayenta, AZ with your mother

in the Blue Coffee Pot. The waitress sets two tall plastic Coke cups

of water before you both. Today, everyone must be especially 

generous to you.

All around: nalis with their tight tsiiyééls and jewels and long velvet skirts 

that brush the floor. Your mother says that the turquoise 

tear drops are a shield. Never take them off. The women smile

at their grandchildren. They don’t sit with any husbands. You’ve become

attuned again to their little song. Your mother says to you that a plate

of mutton will cure any ailment. You both eat with your hands. You could

have cried. Later, it’s back up to Monument Valley

where the rocks look like women, hushed together. KTNN buzzes:

I wanted to be your everything. The only station for miles. Rock formations 

give nothing away. Not everything, you think. Your mother

tells you to use the grease left on your palms to heal your lips. You 

smear your fingers across an eye instead. The other. The monuments flicker

and you hum a song about women with straight backs

and eyelashes strung pretty with rain, a song you heard most

while your grandmother still lived 

and the roosters rampaged in her yard as she bent

over the fire with cardboard and a poker 

and your mother smiled and swayed you on her hip,

looking off, off toward the mountain,

feeding you mutton with her hands.

How to be born in a country that measures your blood in their hands: 

        What, for example, is born in England, but is never, not even on a cloudy day, English? 
            —Bhanu Kapil 

You must live
In the footnotes of a one-drop
rule.
Or blood quantum. Remember,
Never both. You must pull out
Your heart
In exchange for a card. Antithesis
To citizenship. Spit
At the border or they will send troops
And Custer look-alikes.
Always both.
And they will do it
Anyways. You must know
That we never wanted to be here
Either: Ghost
At the threshold. On the mantel,
Or kneeling
On a butter tin. I will teach you
How to steal your insides
Back. I will show you
What I know.

Wax Cylinder

There was a voice calling in the night from the tin

behind the glass. The receptionist noted the sound

of cicadas circling the women’s bathroom. Cylinder,

cicada, legs moving round and round through a brass-

colored mouth. 

The moon said, Look, shiyazhí

                  in so many words suddenly remembered.

How to understand with so many voices

                  scattered to the sea? Flat glass, laser-protected

mahogany drawers. The custodian was scared

of Indian ghosts in the half-light 

                  through the window, how the cylinders

looked like cedar trunks. Every night 

                  the voice would not stop singing 

as he defogged his windshield and zig-zagged home.

The pattern trickled

                  after him, out the front entrance.

I can’t say anything new 

                  about her— she knows herself and her path

home— that desert emerald, eye-socket

                  of a sow skull. There are only one hundred

reruns in a body, the body a weapon

                  when it sings. To unravel, like the sun, which rotates

very slowly and spills itself along, I speak back

to the voice.

I tell her a story. Shimá, 

                  I call her— a woman remembering her place

among the stars. The voice will never be lost

                  while constellations

pulse against the sheaths of glass. Come home, 

                  scattering

in our language full of light.

good fire 

To take back the land is to poem the de-territorialized we; to poem map (we) as insurgent, unconquered, owed to what is lost, what must be protected, and always what is shared; to harvest without accumulation, again, again.

—Zaina Alsous

write what you know: I know cicadas

swallowed by smoke. horizon choked by car

exhaust, bitter raincloud. butterfly 

wings, halved by the heat

and highways. lullaby in grasses straining

to hush the uproar from the waterside. I know from

Yurok, Karuk, Hupa, Miwok, Chumash 

relatives: fire licks the carcass 

clean. moss and acorns soothe a blaze’s hungry

belly, whet her all-consuming eyeteeth,

welcome slumber when she is satisfied. beneath the milkweed

root, cactus rot: alkaline kaleidoscope,

world of new bones. each layer of life-giving

a heavy clot ready for bloom. I thumb parched bark

from the pine in my backyard. shed the years

she has thirsted in this drought.

upstate, the Klamath boils away beneath

a muddy sun. suffocated by the lake’s severed

body, suckerfish skim the surface. their stiff enamel

eyes dried up on arroyo

bank. all that remains: deboned 

ecosystem, corpse-black wash

of trees divvied in 1906 to quench greedy

soil, avocado trees, greenery too lush  

for desert-scape. oh, let her burn softly.

let the lake regain her scattered limbs. there is sweetness

in the scorching. gentle unshelling. let those who have known 

this place reach the clear water 

and drink

Note: An earlier version of "Song for the black cat outside my mother’s apartment" originally appeared in print in Tulip Tree’s Wild Women Issue. An earlier version of “everything is weird…” appeared in print in Yellow Medicine Review. “Wax Cylinder” first appeared in Superstition Review, “Good Fire” in Youth to the People, and “How to be born…” in Cincinnati Review.