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.
