When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through
Page 27
Assignment 44
Bind Tie Bind Tie Bind Tie Small Bind-ed
-ing Wood Water
Binding Fire(in)Sky
Binding the Sky Binding Skies
Binding the Skies(Waters)
Bound and unraveled and bound
And (of)Wood and Skies and bound and
Unravelling the Sky
Unravelling Sky
Unravelling the(in) (Waters)Skies
Unravelling our(Fire) and Skies
and Bind (-ed, -ing) Tie Bind Tie Bound
Assignment 44
Analyze the above conversation. Read it aloud. Read it loudly. Weave a thread through it. Bind your bundle of sayings, be mindful of loose strands. Smooth down frayed edges. Smudge with fire or water.
Extra Credit: Take the relocated points from the previous diagram and use them as an entryway.
First Woman
Emerged from the everlasting clay at the bottom
of Cañon Diablo
Now she walks down Cerrillos toward the plaza
the clay still part of her
bundled in velveteen inside her knapsack
ready for the first display window with the right price
She walks on
wanting to hail a ride
yet wanting her limbs to mark the pavement
ever so lightly with blood and flesh and
quarter-century-plus-old bones
and usually Coyote picks up her scent and comes
sniffin’ around
Yá’átééh’ abíní
Aoo’, yá’átééh, First Woman says
wishing she just walked on
but he knew her tongue
paused to look with both eyes
wide open
bright like sunny-side-up eggs
With big teeth and smile Coyote asks, háágóóshą́’?
Plaza’góó and before he can respond First Woman adds,
Shí k’ad dooleeł, hágoónee’
First Woman turns halfway to get the side ways view
dark hair catching the sun skews her image
and sure enough Coyote
still there
chuckles and says, hazhó’ígo, hazhó’ígo . . .
First woman breathes
focusing the fire within her
tending her own heat
back then
the fire was her first child
Her body
a wood-burning stove
giving her cravings for chili
hot and spicy, rich with flavor and settling with heat
later taking it back with nightmares or itchy breasts or
sore tailbones
Her womb
a cauldron
boiling or simmering
her temperature still a little offset
and First Woman
breathes in the morning
and exhales the scent of wily Coyote
breathes in the white
light rays of the new morning
and coffee still hot enough to sip
and tailpipe exhaust
as she crosses the railroad tracks ever closer toward the plaza
HERSHMAN R. JOHN (1970–), Diné, was born in California and grew up on the Navajo reservation in Sand Springs, Arizona. He earned his MFA from Arizona State University. John’s poetry collection, I Swallow Turquoise for Courage, was published by University of Arizona Press in 2007; his writing appears in numerous anthologies including Nuclear Impact, Family Matters, Teaching as a Human Experience, as well as literary journals. John teaches at Phoenix College and Arizona State University.
A Strong Male Rain
The air dances with wet sand off golden dunes.
The horse begins to get excited
From the whispers of rolling thunder in the distance.
A tidal wave of dust swallows the sky.
A heavy rainstorm is coming.
Slowly he crawls across the sky, angry.
He’s large and bumpy with thick, strapping gray muscles.
This storm cloud is male, that’s what Grandma says.
“When the clouds gather anger, they cry thunder and rain.
This is Male Rain.”
The sudden winds kick up sand into my eyes. I blink.
In a drying puddle from yesterday’s storm, I see Darcy’s face.
Darcy, a Jewish girl from Phoenix—
A friend also afraid of the Male Rain.
Her brother Ean brought on her fears.
Grandma brought on mine.
She told us kids to sit still and don’t talk during a storm
Or we’d get struck by lightning.
When Darcy was young, she used to sit at the window
And watch the lightning show during monsoon season.
Ean walked to his sister by the window.
He grinned his teen-age teeth and said,
“You know, if you stand too close to the window,
A Kugelblitz will get you.”
“A Kugelblitz?” she questioned.
“Yeah, a ball of lightning to chase you.”
She never watched the light show again.
Instead during stormy nights, she silently cried in bed.
Little Jewish tears added to the monsoon’s rain.
She told me this story one rainy night.
I told her about the Male Rain and what not to do during a storm.
She told me about Ean and his tale of the Kugelblitz.
I guess Jews and Navajos aren’t all that different.
We were both afraid of thunderstorms.
We have other past storms we were afraid of too.
She had the Holocaust
And I had America.
Lightning flashes. . . . Thunder follows. . . .
I begin whipping my horse, trying to escape the storms.
CRISOSTO APACHE (1972–), Mescalero Apache, Chiricahua Apache, and Diné of the ‘Áshįįhí (Salt Clan) born for the Kinyaa’áanii (Towering House Clan), was born in Mescalero, New Mexico. He earned an MFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe and debuted his first poetry collection, GENESIS, in 2018. He lives in Denver and teaches writing at various local colleges, where he continues to advocate for Native American two-spirit–identified people.
Ndé’ isdzán [“two of me”]
–my note to selves
SHAUNNA OTEKA MCCOVEY (1972–), Yurok and Karuk, grew up on the Yurok and Hoopa Valley reservations, and in Karuk Country in Northern California. She earned degrees in social work (Humboldt State University and Arizona State University) and in First Nations environmental law (Vermont Law School). Her book of poetry, The Smokehouse Boys, was published in 2005; she also contributed to Eating Fire, Tasting Blood: An Anthology of the American Indian Holocaust and Mni Wiconi/Water Is Life: Honoring the Water Protectors at Standing Rock and Everywhere in the Ongoing Struggle for Indigenous Sovereignty. McCovey taught social work at Humboldt State and is currently compact negotiator for the U.S. Department of the Interior–Indian Affairs, Office of Self Governance.
I Still Eat All of My Meals with a Mussel Shell
Creation stories
thespiritbeings
have long been disputed
emergedfrom
by theories of
theground
evolution and
atKenek
strait crossings.
Because our rivers
halfbreedshave
were once filled
agodthatis
with gold
neitherlndian
our women were violated
orwhite
in the worst imaginable way.
Only a few
prayersgo
still know
unheardwhen
the formula that
notspokenin
will bring the salmon
ournativetongues
up the river.
If you cannot see
Istilleat
between the lines
allofmymeals
then your collected facts
witha
will never constitute
musselshell
knowledge.
SHERWIN BITSUI (1975–), Diné, was born in White Cone, Arizona, and graduated from the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. He has authored three collections of poetry, Shapeshift, Flood Song, and Dissolve. He has been awarded an American Book Award, a Whiting Award, a Truman Capote creative writing fellowship, and a Lannan Literary Fellowship. He teaches at the Institute of American Indian Arts’ MFA program and at Northern Arizona University.
from Flood Song
tó
tó
tó
tó
tó
tó
from Dissolve
This mountain stands near us: mountaining,
it mistakes morning with mourning
when we wear slippers of steam
to erase our carbon footprint.
Wind’s fingers wearing yours
you unravel a plow of harvested light,
notice its embers
when scrubbed on drowned faces—
repel fossilized wind.
The Caravan
The city’s neon embers
stripe the asphalt’s blank page
where this story pens itself nightly;
where ghosts weave their oily hair
into his belt of ice,
dress him in pleated shadows
and lay him fetal
on the icy concrete—
the afterbirth of sirens glistening over him.
We drain our headlights
on his scraped forehead
and watch the December moon
two-step across his waxen eyes;
his mouth’s shallow pond—
a reflecting pool
where his sobs leak into my collar.
One more, just one more, he whispers,
as he thaws back into the shape of nihitstilí
bruised knees thorning against his chest.
We steal away,
our wheels moan
through sleet and ash.
Death places second, third,
and fourth behind us.
At home on the Reservation:
Father sifts dried cedar leaves
over glowing embers,
Mother, hovering
above cellphone light, awaits:
He’s okay,
never went out,
watched a movie instead.
But tonight,
my speech has knives
that quiver at the ellipses
of neon Budweiser signs
blinking through the fogged windshield,
and I text:
I’ve only rescued a sliver of him,
he’s only twenty-five
and he smells like blood and piss,
his turquoise bracelet snatched for pawn,
by the same ghost who traded his jacket
for a robe of snow and ice,
before inviting him
back into the Caravan
for one more, just one more.
ORLANDO WHITE (1976–), Diné, is from Tółikan, Arizona. He is of the Naaneesht’ézhi Tábaahí and born for the Naakai Diné’e. He holds an MFA from Brown University and has published two collections of poetry, Bone Light and LETTERRS. The recipient of the San Francisco Poetry Center Book Award and a Truman Capote creative writing fellowship, White teaches at Diné College in Tsaile, Arizona.
To See Letters
Everything I write requires this: Alphabet.
It was a notion I did not know when I was six years old. In kindergarten I was more interested in the image of a letter on a flash card. I noticed its shape distinguishing itself from its background. Then, with my eyes I tore the O in half. In the moment I felt language separate from its form.
I recall my mother playing a word puzzle. She’d circle a line of letters amongst many other letters scattered on the page. She treated each word carefully never touching the pen to the letters. Then, she would give me the pen. I would circle random letters. She’d smile and give me a hug.
My mother once told me that my step-dad found a picture of my real father. He ripped it up. To this day, I still do not know who my father is.
I always called my step-dad, David. And he called me by my middle name, Orson. To him it was better than looking at me and calling me “son.” I am still ashamed of my middle name.
He tried to teach me how to spell.
I showed him homework from my first grade class. It was a list of words assigned for me to spell. He looked at me as he was sharpening a pencil with his knife. I remember the way he forced my hand to write. How the pencil stabbed each letter, the lead smearing. I imagined each word bruising as I stared at them.
The words reminded me of the word puzzle.
But without images it meant nothing at all.
He said, “Spell them out.”
I could not. “Then sound them out first!”
I recall a day, like many other days in grammar school, when an older boy made fun of me because I could not speak proper English. I always mispronounced words, and I would wonder how to spell them.
I still could not move the pencil in my hand. I saw the letters lined up on paper, but I wanted to circle them.
He shouted out, “Spell them out you little fucker! I am going to hit you if you don’t.”
I remember the shape of his fist.
No one was around, not even my mother. It was as close to intimacy as I got with my step-dad. I did not say anything to anyone. He bought me toys as an act of contrition. I forgave him.
When David hit me in the head, I saw stars in the shape of the Alphabet. Years later, my fascination for letters resulted in poems.
Empty Set
Vacant folio, middle of an unwritten;
coaxial o rolls out from its shape:
unoccupied but
designed by inaudible flashes of colorless.
In the depths of paper, underneath
text; what was before a blank,
another layer of spotless pulp. Circle
out of its dermis ink: human bulb, skull light.
Where the substance of thought
enlightens the narrative of bone,
skeleton according to speech;
of being alive within an empty set.
Like the shape of sound before
ink forms, before structured print
writhes through and out. Curly brackets
enclose sibilant: an s, a phonetic infection.
But a writer corrects what it hears, forgets
in there where ink absorbs paper, evolves
into written fungic. A spore of alphabet cannot
be sterilized with revision; so one creates
a circumference around the letter
to entrap, to press its outbreak of silence.
CASANDRA LÓPEZ (1978–), Cahuilla/Tongva/Luiseño, has an MFA from the University of New Mexico and is the author of a poetry collection, Brother Bullet. Lopez teaches at the Northwest Indian College and is a cofounder of the journal As/Us: A Space for Women of the World. Currently, Lopez is working on a memoir titled “A Few Notes on Grief.”
A New Language
My words are always
collapsing
upon themselves, too tight
in my mouth. I want a new
language. One with at least
50 words for grief
and 50 words for love, so I can offer
them to the living
who mourn the dead. I want
a language that understands
sister-pain and heart-hurt. So
when I tell you Brother
is my hook of heart, you will see
the needle threading me to
the others, numbered
men,
women and children
of our grit spit city.
I want a language to tell you
about 2010’s
37th homicide. The unsolved:
a man that my city turned
to number,
sparking me
back to longer days when:
Ocean is the mouth
of summer. Our shell fingers
drive into sand, searching–we find
tiny silver sand crabs,
we scoop and scoop till we bore and go
in search of tangy seaweed.
We are salted sun. How we brown
to earth. Our warm flesh flowering.
In this new language our bones say
sun and sea, reminding us of an old
language our mouths have forgotten, but
our marrow remembers.
JULIAN TALAMANTEZ BROLASKI (1978–), Mescalero and Lipan Apache, were born in California and received their PhD at University of California Berkeley. They are a two-spirit and transgender poet and musician, author of gowanus atropolis, Advice for Lovers, and Of Mongrelitude, and coeditor of NO GENDER: Reflections on the Life & Work of kari edwards. Along with poetry and writing, they are a cofounder of the Indigenous Peoples’ Committee at Pratt Institute.
Stonewall to Standing Rock
who by the time it arrived
had made its plan heretofore