by Joy Harjo
Bird don’t fly here,
but there is the sound of wings.
The smell, just a struggle in the earth
underneath the musty floorboards.
Monsters hatch fully-grown from their eggs.
Snaky legs indicate chaos.
I carry sad omens,
slobber down the psychic’s legs
to her feet pointed backwards.
I roll off the back of a skull strapped on top
of a fox who shape-shifts into the irresistible.
A Christian, Oklahoma-shaped and melancholic,
caught at the entrance of a ditch
as the best breath of me tornadoes into the next county.
M. L. SMOKER (1975–), Assiniboine and Sioux, received her BA from Pepperdine University and her MFA from the University of Montana, where she received the Richard Hugo Memorial Scholarship. She also attended UCLA and was a Battrick Fellow at the University of Colorado. Hanging Loose Press published her first collection, Another Attempt at Rescue, in 2005. In 2009, she coedited a collection of human rights poetry, I Go to the Ruined Place, with Melissa Kwasny. She lives in Helena, Montana, where she works in the Indian Education division of the Office of Public Instruction. Her family home is on Tabexa Wakpa (Frog Creek).
Crosscurrent
For James Welch
The first harvest of wheat in flatlands
along the Milk startled me into thoughts of you
and this place we both remember and also forget as home.
Maybe it was the familiarity or maybe it was my own
need to ask if you have ever regretted leaving.
What bends, what gives?
And have you ever missed this wind?—it has now
grown warm with late summer, but soon
it will be as dangerous as the bobcat stalking calves
and pets just south of the river.
Men take out their dogs, a case of beer and wait
in their pickups for dawn, for a chance with their rifles.
They don’t understand that she isn’t going to make
any mistakes. With winter my need for an answer
grows more desperate and there are only four roads out.
One is the same cat hunters drive with mannish glory
and return along, gun still oil-shined and unshot.
Another goes deeper into Assiniboine territory:
This is the one I should talk myself into taking next.
I haven’t much traveled the third except to visit
a hospital where, after the first time,
my mother had refused chemotherapy.
And the last road you know as well as I do—
past the coral-painted Catholic church, its doors
long ago sealed shut to the mouth of Mission Canyon,
then south just a ways, to where the Rockies cut open
and forgive. There you and I are on the ascent.
After that, the arrival is what matters most.
Casualties
. . . linguistic diversity also forms a system necessary to our survival as human beings.
—Michael Krauss
The sun has broken through.
Breaking through,
this sun–but still
today my words are dying out.
Still as I tell of stillness
of a very word
as ( ) as it leaves this world.
My grandmother was told that the only way to survive was
to forget.
Where were you?
Where were
you? Speaking of myself
for my own neglect: too often
I was nowhere to be found.
I will not lie.
I heard the ruin in each Assiniboine voice.
I ignored them
all. On
the vanishing, I have been
mute. I have risked
a great deal.
Hold me accountable
because I have not done my part
to stay alive.
As a child I did not hear the words often enough to recognize
what I was losing.
There are a great many parts of my own
body that are gone:
where hands
belong there is one lost syllable.
And how a tooth might sound–
its absence
a falling.
Sound is so frail a thing.
( ) hold me responsible,
in light of failure
I have let go of one too many.
I have never known where or how
to begin.
TREVINO L. BRINGS PLENTY (1976–), Minneconjou Lakota, was born and raised on the Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation in South Dakota and now lives and works in Portland, Oregon. His books include Wakpá Wanáǧi, Ghost River (2015) and Real Indian Junk Jewelry (2012), and his poetry is included in Shedding Skins: Four Sioux Poets (2008), edited by Adrian C. Louis.
Ghost River
I’m mostly water.
There has been family swept under by raw currents.
I’m from planters from the river.
We dredged riverbed bones.
Water is faces lined blue.
Red horses bay bodies hooked from fish line.
And what was sown, brown hands dug free.
I’m mostly other people.
Family is pulled pail full from source.
I’m from river people.
We prep the light from matted hair.
Water catches flame.
The black horses hoof rock, halving them like thin, infant skulls.
And what was sown, brown hands dug free.
Blizzard, South Dakota
Months afterwards, I see the electrical poles
piled along the road.
When the blizzard smothered the land,
my tribe was displaced.
Like shot gun blasts heard in the distance,
those poles snapped,
weighted by ice.
A month in motels,
we ate fast food,
while the winter deer meat
expired in the basement.
Movie stars flocked to Haiti.
We watched the news,
wondered about us,
about our reservation,
about our home.
Those dialysis machines failed
without electricity,
pushed people farther away,
closer to the spirit world.
I still hear those poles
ricochet at these wakes.
HEATHER CAHOON (1976–), Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, received her MFA from the University of Montana in 2001, where she was a Richard Hugo Scholar. She went on to earn an interdisciplinary PhD in history, anthropology, and Native American studies. Her chapbook Elk Thirst received a Merriam-Frontier Award from the University of Montana’s College of Humanities and Sciences in 2005, and in 2015, she received a Montana Arts Council Artist’s Innovation Award. She is the author of the poetry collection Horsefly Dress and works as a state-tribal policy analyst for the Montana Budget and Policy Center and lives in Missoula.
Blonde
It is November and the sun has gone south almost
as far as it can. Cold air flies wildly through the sky,
the bare and frantic reaches of trees, and through
the dying grasses on Camas Prairie. This wind
knows me by the color of my hair, a light in darkness.
It is November and I can see my soul
slowly leaving my body every time I exhale.
Dad and I take the shortcut across Camas Prairie
to Dog Lake. He is telling me stories
of children with black hair and brown eyes.
My reflection in the side mirror tells me
what I already know. He talks
of these children until I am left standing
in the i
cy wind watching as he drives away.
It is November and the dying grasses on the prairie
are the same color as my hair. If I wanted I could
lie down in them and disappear, I could escape
the angry wind. But I don’t, I know the land and I
would blend together into one and then no one
would ever know I had existed. So I stand.
TANAYA WINDER (1985–), Duckwater Shoshone, Southern Ute, and Pyramid Lake Paiute, grew up in Ignacio, Colorado, on the Southern Ute Reservation. She received her BA in English from Stanford University and her MFA from the University of New Mexico. Her debut poetry collection, Words Like Love, was published in 2015, followed by Why Storms Are Named After People and Bullets Remain Nameless in 2017. She cofounded As/Us: A Space for Women of the World, a magazine focused on publishing works by underrepresented writers, and she founded Dream Warriors, an Indigenous artist management company. She has taught at the University of Colorado Boulder, Stanford University, and the University of New Mexico, and is the director of the University of Colorado Boulder’s Upward Bound program.
learning to say i love you
my favorite conversations are with my grandmother while she
teaches me words in “Indian” as she says. I ask,
how do you say, where did you go? and where are you going?
Questions that layer my tongue in ash, reminding me of fire,
the taste. Each time I speak, the slow burn of every loss I have
witnessed cracks my lips. Go and going—acts singed
into my bones so I ask. Teach me I’m coming with you so it sits
rock heavy in my mouth because my tongue is at war
with history, boarding school “Kill the Indian, Save the Man”
acts of colonization. Strain pronunciation. When I want to say,
take me with you it dis so l v e s
before I can stomach the sweetness of language. Ours,
I am losing. I am lost lodged somewhere in my throat
between decades of bro ken syl la bles. Teach me
how to reach the ones who are born already running.
Teach me how to talk to the ones who need it most.
Dear Universe, gift me words
that l i n g e r
softly like dusk. There must be a phrase
to contain wherever you go
whether or not you know where you’ve been
or where you are going.
the milky way escapes my mouth
whenever two lips begin to form your name
I cough stars lodged deep within my lungs. They rush
from tongue weighted in dust, words
I didn’t ask
where are you going? or notice the blank spaces
in your breathing as you slept. They say
the more massive the star, the shorter
the lifespan.
They have greater pressure on their cores. Yours burned
so brightly I should have known you’d collapse, disappear
into image, a black hole dissolving
trace amounts.
I am left stargazing five times a day for years. Catalogue
phrases. Chart each word. Label every facial expression.
Telescope until eyes bleed constellations
even then
I can’t navigate my way into understanding light years–
how we let darkness slip in. Is it madness to wonder
if it ever really happened? You, a shadow never
leaving until I
inserted continents between us. I lost you in the crevice
between night and day. You died while I was sleeping
dreaming of a galaxy far far away where
love eclipses.
A rising tide of longing fills my body, bones, the ribs
sheltering the cave within me echoing. Each night,
I open mouth sky-wide to swallow stars
and sing
to the moon a story about the light of two people
who continue to cross and uncross in their falling
no matter how unstable
in orbit.
PACIFIC NORTHWEST, ALASKA, AND
PACIFIC ISLANDS
POETRY OF THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST:
THE ARC OF THE EDIFICE
Cedar Sigo
NATIVE PEOPLE of the Northwest had no choice but to live in relation to poetry from the very outset of creation. We had to learn to identify and convert the individual elements of earth into forms of protection and sustenance, a so-called lifestyle. This would involve courtship, and gathering of every necessary berry, moss, bark, and wood. I remember stories of Suquamish women leaving for several days on summer journeys over the Cascade Mountains into eastern Washington to gather luminous bear grass, those pieces that would sometimes tell stories along the outer surface of our baskets.
This draping of my history within the landscape has become an available arc that we tap into at will. Michael Wasson’s “Poem for the háawtnin’ & héwlekipx” [The Holy Ghost of You, the Space & Thin Air] is driven by a similar recognition as well as a willingness to reveal aspects of composition within the poem itself:
I imagine
smudging my tongue along a wall
like the chest
I dare to plunge in-
to, the Braille of every node
blooming out
as if the first day-
light of wintered
snowfall.
The surfaces gained in Wasson’s poem are intensely reflective, throwing light at every break in the line. The poem forms an enclosure around its reader; nothing so simple as a hall of mirrors, this feels more like an alchemical bath. The poet is being reborn and seemingly splintered back into the natural world.
Gloria Bird is another master of the lyric, often leaving a secret door (or mirror) in the turn of her lines, hinting at another arc the poem might have taken. She dissolves the needless walls between syllables through an ingrained, behind-the-beat feel for phrasing, and this hypnotic rhythm often takes the lead in unlocking her expansive imagery:
appointed places set in motion like seasons. We are like salmon
swimming against the mutation of current to find
our heartbroken way home again, weight of red eggs and need
Duane Niatum’s lines are as deeply graven as those of any bent-wood box or totem carving. His work reminds us that poetry can incur the weight and grandeur of a ceremonial object. I seem to remember his poems as a series of interconnected, colorful weavings intent on charting a poet’s journey in and out of the realm of magic. He seems to soar above the poem as it is being uncovered and to light each of his images individually:
I camp in the light of the fox
Within the singing mirror of night,
Hunt for courage to return to the voice
Whirling my failures through the meadow
Elizabeth Woody’s work uses elements of traditional art-making to recast her tribal narrative as one of continued survival. Her poems feel like power deconstructed, as only a sculptor might attempt, language arranged into objects we cannot turn away from. We witness her incredible agency and all-enveloping tone throughout “Translation of Blood Quantum”:
THIRTY-SECOND PARTS OF A HUMAN BEING
SUN MOON EVENING STAR AT DAWN CLOUDS
RAINBOW CEDAR
LANGUAGE COLORS AND SACRIFICE LOVE
THE GREAT FLOOD
THE TORTOISE CARRIES THE PARROT HUMMINGBIRD TRILLIUM
After breaking into this imaginative and itemized list (this is only an excerpt), she goes on to detail her sense of what a politics of self-determination looks like and how to actualize this energy within our work:
Our Sovereignty is permeated, in its possession
of our individual rights, by acknowledgment of good
for the whole
and this includes the freedom of the Creator in these teachings
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given to and practiced by The People.
Poetry can contain so many types of voices within one instance of writing; its restlessness and need for flexibility are two of its greatest strengths. This sensation can border upon utopia as syllabic, concrete-sounding sections of a poem may lie next to restorative political strategies and then begin to break into rhythms of incantation and chant. I tend to cast Elizabeth Woody’s work in a heroic light because of her unwavering willingness to write the world she wants to live in as well as for her willingness to speak for more than just herself. She defines our struggle as ongoing, as an eternal and aspirational state, a substance from which we are meant to form poetry as well as to speak out in protest. Her poem is reminiscent of Chief Seattle’s speech during the treaty negotiations of 1854 addressing then-governor of Washington State, Isaac Stevens:
And when the last red man shall have perished from the earth and his memory among the white men shall have become a myth these shores will swarm with the invisible dead of my tribe; and when your children’s children shall think themselves alone in the fields, the store, the shop, upon the highway, or in the silence of the pathless woods, they will not be alone. In all the earth there is no place dedicated to solitude.
Just as we first formed a poetry out of our literal surroundings, we then had to move on to preserving these traditions as they were quickly becoming outlawed by the U.S. government. When elements of trauma begin to surface within our histories, the action begins to be told in reverse. To this day we are still fighting to be seen as living, breathing, contemporary artists.
I have come to think of Native Poets as warrior/prophets that can move (almost routinely) beyond our own bodies. We are hovering, scribing entities, free to drop back into our trenches as needed. It is the poems themselves that provide the bedrock for further resistance and redefinition. Becoming a better listener is also such a huge part of becoming a more complete poet, to always leave ourselves open to new frequencies. This collection will no doubt spark new changes and touchstones for artists of every discipline.