New Poets of Native Nations, page 5
Owotaŋna Sececa
Hekta ehaŋna
ḳaŋpi hena
taku owas
ecipaṡ
hdi ce e
eyapi.
Tka tokiya taŋhaŋ
uŋhipi he.
Toked kiya
uŋyapi kta he.
Ina ate kuŋṡi uŋkaŋna
wicayutakupida ṡni.
Ikce wicaṡtapi ṡni waŋna
caże wicoie wocekiya
kcihdaya nażiŋpi
wotapi kte heyake toktokca
wicapażo wicayuhapi.
Hetaŋhaŋ uŋkicaġapi
tka tiwahe taku sdodyapi ṡni.
Sdodyapi ṡni.
Tka waŋna ake ecipaṡ
kiya uŋkupi
ecineṡ
hekta ehaŋna
eyapi taku
owas ecipaṡ
hdi
ce e.
Linear Process
Our elders say
the universe is a
circle.
Everything
returns to its
beginnings.
But where do we go
from here?
Where are
our beginnings?
Our parents were stripped
of their parents
names tongues prayers,
lined up for their meals
clothes classes tests.
When it was our turn
to come into this world,
they did not know
what family meant
anymore.
They did not
know.
Yet even
from here,
we can
see that the
straightest line
on a map
is a
circle.
Genetic Code
On the edge of a dream,
the songs came.
Condensed from the fog,
like dewdrops on cattails,
they formed perfectly clear.
Whispering through leaves,
heavy voices rise up,
drift beyond night
toward the silent dawn,
and sing.
Hekta ehaŋna ded uŋṭipi.
Heuŋ he ohiŋni uŋkiksuyapi kte.
Aŋpetu dena ded uŋṭipi.
Heca ohiŋni uŋdowaŋpi kte.
Always on still morning air,
they come,
connected by
memories and
song.
Quantum Theory
Cut by a paper razor, I watch blood fill
a perfectly straight wound on my finger,
Denying the swirl of generations before me and
the possibility of those held in my dreams.
Illusory, the narrow and unyielding course fills
in red, then overflows into a galaxy where
Blood carries stories of our origins from
beyond the stars.
Dakota Homecoming
We are so honored that
you are here, they said.
We know that this is
your homeland, they said.
The admission price
is five dollars, they said.
Here is your button
for the event, they said.
It means so much to us that
you are here, they said.
We want to write
an apology letter, they said.
Tell us what to say.
Theory Doesn’t Live Here
My grandparents never talked
about theory, decolonization, or
post-colonial this or that.
They talked about
good times and bad times.
Their self-determination was
not a struggle against
colonialism affecting their
self-imagination.
They worked hard to survive.
They didn’t imagine themselves
through story.
They knew themselves
through the stories they heard
as they sat under the kitchen table
listening to the old people talk.
They didn’t need theory
to explain where they came from—
they lived it.
Undivided Interest
This is what is left of my land:
Meridian 05 Township 151N
Range 064W Section 09
Acres 40 Type 253500 PA
IA 708
Letters and numbers.
Fractions.
Undivided interest—divided
among 336 heirs.
My interest equals 0.119 acres.
My ancestor an Indian Account.
Her name was not IA 708.
She was called Tiyowaštewin
and her interest was
undivided.
JENNIFER ELISE FOERSTER
Jennifer Elise Foerster, a member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation of Oklahoma, is an alumna of the Institute of American Indian Arts, the Vermont College of Fine Arts, and is completing a PhD at the University of Denver. She is the recipient of a 2017 NEA Creative Writing Fellowship and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow.
Foerster is the author of Leaving Tulsa (2013) and Bright Raft in the Afterweather (2018).
Leaving Tulsa
FOR COSETTA
Once there were coyotes, cardinals
in the cedar. You could cure amnesia
with the trees of our back-forty. Once
I drowned in a monsoon of frogs—
Grandma said it was a good thing, a promise
for a good crop. Grandma’s perfect tomatoes.
Squash. She taught us to shuck corn, laughing,
never spoke about her childhood
or the faces in gingerbread tins
stacked in the closet.
She was covered in a quilt, the Creek way.
But I don’t know this kind of burial:
vanishing toads, thinning pecan groves,
peach trees choked by palms.
New neighbors tossing clipped grass
over our fence line, griping to the city
of our overgrown fields.
Grandma fell in love with a truck driver,
grew watermelons by the pond
on our Indian allotment,
took us fishing for dragonflies.
When the bulldozers came
with their documents from the city
and a truckload of pipelines,
her shotgun was already loaded.
Under the bent chestnut, the well
where Cosetta’s husband
hid his whiskey—buried beneath roots
her bundle of beads. They tell
the story of our family. Cosetta’s land
flattened to a parking lot.
Grandma potted a cedar sapling
I could take on the road for luck.
She used the bark for heart lesions
doctors couldn’t explain.
To her they were maps, traces of home,
the Milky Way, where she’s going, she said.
After the funeral
I stowed her jewelry in the ground,
promised to return when the rivers rose.
On the grassy plain behind the house
one buffalo remains.
Along the highway’s gravel pits
sunflowers stand in dense rows.
Telephone poles crook into the layered sky.
A crow’s beak broken by a windmill’s blade.
It is then I understand my grandmother:
When they see open land
they only know to take it.
I understand how to walk among hay bales
looking for turtle shells.
How to sing over the groan of the county road
widening to four lanes.
I understand how to keep from looking up:
small planes trail overhead
as I kneel in the Johnson grass
combing away footprints.
Up here, parallel to the median
with a vista of mesas’ weavings,
the sky a belt of blue and white beadwork,
I see our hundred and sixty acres
stamped on God’s forsaken country,
a roof blown off a shed,
beams bent like matchsticks,
a drove of white cows
making their home
in a derailed train car.
Pottery Lessons I
hokte hokte honvnwv*
begin here
with the clay she says
under her breath a handful of earth
from silt-bottomed streams
loosens between fingers water
echoes in an empty bowl hokte
hoktet hecet os*
I was birthed of mud blood
And bone hokte
hoktet hecet os
glass globes
inside my tin belly
echo of water
in an empty bowl
I remember the sound of her soft
body hokte
hokte honvnwv
Have just begun
to bleed today
thought I might be dying
walked barefoot beyond
the backyard
over the cattle guard hokte
hokte honvnwv
each grass blade
a rusted glint in the circular
basin of bison
grazing clay rims
the water colored sky
in the empty bowl
water echoes
when we walk
horizons shift how to call them
closer feel their white tufts
between fingertips hokte
hokte honvnwv
*Mvskoke (Muscogee)—hokte: woman, honvnwv: man, hecet os: to see
Birthmark
Homeland? On my ankle: claw
or fin. Mud? No. I was born with it.
A bit of dirt and I stole it back.
Permanent insertion: under the skin.
Use my frog dissection kit.
Do it in the bathtub so I can hide
the blood. Blemish: many women have them.
Homeland. Cosmetic surgery.
Scab. You were born with it.
Whittling knife: what the women
once used. You will never know
Grief. Deep, as if grief were some
body of water. I begin. To teach myself
to swim. Inside a continent.
A scar on my skin.
When the blood dries it looks like
ink. In secret. She may harm herself
if I send her home. I travel often
without a map. Found a garden
inside a wall made of river stones.
Bones among the weeds, wild roses,
was not supposed to be there—
running so fast—thorn-scraped ankles.
That’s how I got here.
That’s what I tell the psychiatrist.
Yes, it looks like a lung. A drawing of a lung
should be enough for them so I decide
to stop speaking. For a month. Keep on forgetting
my name when they ask me.
On purpose, just to please them.
It will be safer for you here
and then you can go home.
What is your language?
Nouns doing something to something
else. Verb: what you contain
between them. A place
to pass through until I forget
I had the map of that place
to begin with. Born with it,
a stain on the skin. A garden
always flowering,
petals dropping. With them
I go down rapids.
What is the destination?
Write a letter when I decide to go.
Dear Ghost: Nothing left to say.
I want only to be round again,
rolled between thumbs, a bead
folded back inside the leather
where I come from—preference:
writing. With pens.
I learn the names of medications
keep the bird beneath my skin.
This is preservation.
Tell my father: it is a birthmark
not a scar.
~
It looks like a little boat to me.
Something to cross by.
I take the knife only because
I want to survive.
Grief is a deep and dreamless creek
until I dream. Drown in my living room
when no one is home. That’s how I got here.
That’s what I tell the psychiatrist.
ln the dream it is a claw print of a bird.
Sharp enough to write with.
I put it in my mouth.
What kind of girl are you?
The girl you want me to be. Be proud
of where you come from.
Where do birds come from?
The scar fits you. In the same way
Grandmother gives me white gloves:
initiation rite into the first bright day.
I was bleeding up to the eyelids
of the sun, the light in its pillbox:
Where do you come from?
I don’t see my name
in the provided spelling.
The gloves aren’t white
after the garden. Sometimes
skin does not wash clean of earth,
does not replace itself. Sometimes
you have to cut skin deeper
for the wound to heal, to locate
in a different way—running:
find your own map on the body.
Inside it. Carved into passage.
Sometimes you have to drown
to retrieve it from the river-bottom.
Where are you going? Home. Land.
What is your homeland? A framing
of absence, echo of water.
You will have to live
with these scars now.
No. I am retracing my name.
Chimera
I have traveled this continent
for no other reason but to search
for evidence of your existence.
In the stars, America, your highway
vanishes. Black moths are captured
in headlights and swallowed.
In the beginning, you had said,
we were cracked against the sky.
Now I read the highway
for the fall-out of your name
as you step again into the passing lane,
turn to the illuminated crest of hill
where a line of traffic outlines the dark—
in your silhouette I can still see myself
as a child, waiting for a car
to swerve around the corner.
But no car came that afternoon.
I stood there in the patient street,
my summer dress rippling.
Blood Moon Triptych
I. PALIMPSEST
We watched the eclipse
under burnt-out street lamps
until we darkened into the same
imprint: bone, tree,
every other breath
one of ocean.
Moon
earth fragment
remember us.
II. ECLIPSE
Time is so demanding
wearing out all the linens—
the parchment, tablets,
my evening melody.
As if the margins
were attempting to cross
the poem, corpse
of the corpus.
Moon’s imprinted veil.
III. VEIL
Stumble past cypress
to the cliff’s edge—
below you the town’s lights
blink—extinguished.
Orion, the giant,
walks blind over water.
What you see in the waves
are not stars: look up!
Bright net cast across
still-frosted pines—
leafy sea dragons,
ballerina eels.
You drift, a planet
forgotten in the infinite
body—dashed
on a soundless stone.
The clot in the sky
is not the moon
but blood—the body
you turned against.
Canyon
Brush over star’s dust,
upthrust shale,
erosion-stripped script of ledges—
sloughing scales off
our hands’ finned imprints,
slow-aging metamorphic skins
quartz
schist
gypsum—
marine bones bedded in the drainage.
The basin overflows with wind.
Horizon—phantom barges,
a shore once lush with cane.
Moon—a relic in the azure sky,
gray face cut from the mountain’s spine.
A line of dust divides us—narwhal
& ghost—ancient stream
whose sound remains
floodland / arroyo
yucca / saguaro
I dive with pipevine swallowtails
down winding stairs, crenulated lava—
scrolls, fossilized in radiant strata, read
prickly pear / silver cholla
spicules of sponge
Here in this rain-shadow’s stark
flanked gully, two blue-bellied lizards
streak across sand—vanish
inside a conch shell. Arrived
at the bottom of the world, I write.
Buried in the canyon’s
spiraled larynx—
a raft for the coming storm.
NATALIE DIAZ
Natalie Diaz is a Mojave poet and enrolled member of the Gila River Indian Community. Diaz is an indigenous language activist and former professional basketball player. Her honors include a Lannan Literary Fellowship, a US Artist Ford Fellowship, and the Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University.
When My Brother Was an Aztec (2012) is Diaz’s first book of poetry. Her next collection is post-colonial love poem.
Dome Riddle
Tonight I am riddled by this thick skull
this white bowling ball zipped in the sad-sack carrying case of my face,
this overwound bone jack-in-the-box,
this Orlando’s zero, Oaxacan offering: cabeza locada, calayera azucarada,
