New Poets of Native Nations, page 6
clavo jodido, cenote of Mnemosyne,
this sticky-sweet guilt hive, piedra blanca del rio oscuro,
this small-town medical mania dispensary, prescribed cranium pill,
this electric blue tom-tom drum ticking like an Acme bomb, hypnotized
explosive device, pensive general, scalp-strapped warrior, soldier
with a loaded God complex,
this Hotchkiss-obliterated headdress, Gatling-lit labyrinth,
this memory grenade, death epithet, death epitaph, mound of momento
mori,
this twenty-two-part talisman wearing a skirt of breasts, giant ball of masa,
this god patella in the long leg of my torso, zoo of canines and Blake’s
tygers,
this red-skinned apple, lamp illuminated by teeth, gang of grin, spitwad
of scheme,
this jawbone of an ass, smiling sliver of smite, David’s rock striking the
Goliath of my body,
this Library of Babel, homegrown Golgotha, nostalgia menagerie, melon
festival,
this language mausoleum; chuksanych iraavtahanm, ’avi kwa’anyay,
sumach nyamasav,
this hidden glacier hungry for a taste of titanic flesh,
this pleasure altar, French-kiss sweatshop, abacus of one-night stands,
hippocampus whorehouse, oubliette of regret,
this church of tongue, chapel of vengeance, cathedral of thought, bone
dome of despair, plaza del toro y pensamientos,
this museum of tribal dentistry, commodity cranium cupboard, petrified
dream catcher,
this sun-ruined basketball I haul—rotted gray along the seams—perpetual
missed shot,
this insomnia podium, little bowl in a big fish, brain amphitheater, girl in
the moon,
this 3 a.m. war bell, duende vision prison,
this single-scoop vanilla head rush, thunder head, fastball, lightning rod,
this mad scientist in a white lab helmet, ghost of Smoking Mirror,
this coyote beacon, calcium corral of pale perlino ponies,
this desert seed I am root to, night-blooming cereus, gourd gone rattle,
this Halloween crown, hat rack, worry contraption, Rimbaud’s drunken
boat, blazing chandelier, casa de relámpago,
this coliseum venation: Borges’s other tiger licking the empty shell of
Lorca’s white tortuga,
this underdressed godhead, forever-hatching egg, this mug again and
again at my lips,
and all this because tonight I imagined you sleeping with her
the way we once slept—as intimate as a jaw, maxilla and mandible hot,
in the skin—in love, our heads almost touching.
Other Small Thundering
We are born with spinning coins in place of eyes,
paid in full to ferry Charon’s narrow skiffs—
we red-cloaked captains helming dizzying fits
of sleep. Tied to the masts,
not to be driven mad by the caroling of thirsty children
or the symphony of dogs slaking hunger
by licking our ribcages like xylophones.
Our medicine bags are anchored with buffalo nickels—
sleek skulls etched by Gatlings.
How we plow and furrow the murky Styx, lovingly
digging with smooth dark oars—
like they are Grandmother’s missing legs—
a familiar throb of kneecap, shin, ankle, foot—
promising to carry us home.
A gunnysack full of tigers wrestles in our chests—
they pace, stalking our hearts, building a jail
with their stripes. Each tail a fuse. Each eye a cinder.
Chest translates to bomb.
Bomb is a song—
the drum’s shame-hollowed lament.
Burlap is no place for prayers or hands.
The reservation is no place for a jungle.
But our stomachs growl. Somewhere within us
there lies a king, and when we find him …
The snow-dim prairies are garlanded with children—
my people fancy dance circles around pyres but do not
celebrate the bodies, small, open, red as hollyhocks.
Some crawled until they came undone—
petal by petal,
striping the white field crimson.
Others lay where they first fell, enamored by the warmth
Of a blanket of blood.
My dress is bluer than a sky weeping bones—
so this is the way to build a flag—
with a pretty little Springfield .45 caliber rifle.
So this is the way to sew wounds—
with a hot little Howitzer.
Yesterday is much closer than today—
a black bayonet carried between the shoulder blades
like an itch or the bud of a wing.
We’ve memorized the way a Hotchkiss can wreck a mouth.
Streetlights glow, neon gourds, electric dandelions—
blow them out!
Wish hard for orange buttes and purple canyons,
moon-hoofed horses with manes made from wars,
other small thundering.
American Arithmetic
Native Americans make up less than
one percent of the population of America.
0.8 percent of 100 percent.
O, mine efficient country.
I do not remember the days
before America—I do not remember the days
when we were all here.
Police kill Native Americans more
than any other race. Race is a funny word.
Race implies someone will win,
implies I have as good a chance of winning as—
Who wins the race which isn’t a race?
Native Americans make up 1.9 percent
of all police killings, higher than any race,
and we exist as .8 percent of all Americans.
Sometimes race means run.
We are not good at math.
Can you blame us?
We’ve had an American education.
We are Americans and we are less than 1 percent
of Americans. We do a better job of dying
by police than we do existing.
When we are dying, who should we call?
The police? Or our senator?
Please, someone, call my mother.
In Arithmetic and in America,
divisibility has rules—
divide without remainder.
At the National Museum of the American Indian,
68 percent of the collection is from the U.S.
I am doing my best to not become a museum
of myself. I am doing my best to breathe in and out.
I am begging: Let me be lonely but not invisible.
But in this American city with all its people,
I am Native American—less than one, less than
whole—I am less than myself. Only a fraction
of a body, let’s say, I am only a hand—
and when I slip it beneath the shirt of my lover
I disappear completely.
The First Water Is the Body
The Colorado River is the most endangered river in the United States—also, it is a part of my body.
I carry a river. It is who I am: ‘Aha Makav.
This is not metaphor.
When a Mojave says, Inyech ‘Aha Makavch ithuum, we are saying our name.
We are telling a story of our existence. The river runs through the middle of my body.
So far, I have said the word river in every stanza. I don’t want to waste water. I must preserve the river in my body.
In future stanzas, I will try to be more conservative.
~
The Spanish called us, Mojave. Colorado, the name they gave our river because it was silt-red-thick.
Natives have been called red forever. I have never met a red native, not even on my reservation, not even at the Museum of the American Indian, not even at the largest powwow in Parker, Arizona.
I live in the desert along a dammed blue river. The only red people I’ve seen are white tourists sunburned after being out on the water too long.
~
‘Aha Makav is the true name of our people, given to us by our Creator who loosed the river from the earth and built it, into our living bodies.
Translated into English, ‘Aha Makav means the river runs through the middle of our body, the same way it runs through the middle of our land.
This is a poor translation, like all translations.
In American minds, the logic of this image will lend itself to surrealism or magical realism—
Americans prefer a magical red Indian, or a shaman, or a fake Indian in a red dress, over a real native. Even a real native carrying the dangerous and heavy blues of a river in her body.
What threatens white people is often dismissed as myth.
I have never been true in America. America is my myth.
~
Derrida says, Every text remains in mourning until it is translated.
When Mojaves say the word for tears, we return to our word for river, as if our river were flowing from our eyes. A great weeping, is how you might translate it. Or, a river of grief.
But who is this translation for? And will they come to my language’s four-night funeral to grieve what has been lost in my efforts at translation? When they have drunk dry my river will they join the mourning procession across our bleached desert?
The word for drought is different across many languages and lands.
The ache of thirst, though, translates to all bodies along the same paths—the tongue and the throat. No matter what language you speak, no matter the color of your skin.
~
We carry the river, its body of water, in our body.
I do not mean to imply a visual relationship. Such as:—a native woman on her knees holding a box of Land O’ Lakes butter whose label has a picture of a native woman on her knees holding a box of Land O’ Lakes butter whose label has a picture of a native woman on her knees …
We carry the river, its body of water, in our body. I do not mean to invoke the Droste effect.
I mean river as a verb. A happening. It is moving within me right now.
~
This is not juxtaposition. Body and water are not two unlike things—they are more than close together or side by side. They are same—body, being, energy, prayer, current, motion, medicine.
This knowing comes from acknowledging the human body has more than six senses. The body is beyond six senses. Is sensual. Is always an ecstatic state of energy, is always on the verge of praying, or entering any river of movement.
Energy is a moving like a river moving my moving body.
~
In Mojave thinking, body and land are the same. The words are separated only by letters: ‘iimat for body, ‘amat for land. In conversation, we often use a shortened form for each: mat-. Unless you know the context of a conversation, you might not know if we are speaking about our body or our land. You might not know which has been injured, which is remembering, which is alive, which was dreamed, which needs care, which has vanished.
If I say, My river is disappearing, do I also mean, My people are disappearing?
~
How can I translate—not in words but in belief—that a river is a body, as alive as you or I, that there can be no life without it?
~
John Berger wrote, “true translation is not a binary affair between two languages but a triangular affair. The third point of the triangle being what lay behind the words of the original text before it was written. True translation demands a return to the pre-verbal.”
Between the English translation I offered, and the urging I felt to first type ‘Aha Makav in the lines above, is not the point where this story ends or begins.
We must go to the place before those two points—we must go to the third place that is the river.
We must go to the point of the lance our creator stabbed into the earth, and the first river bursting from that clay body into mine. We must submerge beneath those once warm red waters now channeled-blue and cool, the current’s endless yards of emerald silk wrapping the body and moving it, swift enough to take life or give it.
We must go until we smell the black-root-wet anchoring the river’s mud banks.
~
What is this third point, this place beyond the surface, if not the deep-cut and crooked bone bed where the Colorado River runs—like a one thousand four-hundred and fifty mile thirst—into and through a body?
Berger called it the pre-verbal. Pre-verbal as in the body when the body was more than body. Before it could name itself body and be limited to the space body indicated.
Pre-verbal is the place where the body was yet a green-blue energy greening, greened and bluing the stone, the floodwaters, the razorback fish, the beetle, and the cottonwoods’ and willows’ shaded shadows.
Pre-verbal was when the body was more than a body and possible.
One of its possibilities was to hold a river within it.
~
A river is a body of water. It has a foot, an elbow, a mouth. It runs. It lies in a bed. It can make you good. It remembers everything.
~
America is a land of bad math and science: the Right believes Rapture will save them from the violence they are delivering upon the earth and water; the Left believes technology, the same technology wrecking the earth and water, will save them from the wreckage or help them build a new world on Mars.
~
If I was created to hold the Colorado River, to carry its rushing inside me, how can I say who I am if the river is gone?
What does ‘Aha Makav mean if the river is emptied to the skeleton of its fish and the miniature sand dunes of its dry silten beds?
If the river is a ghost, am I?
Unsoothable thirst is one type of haunting.
~
A phrase popular or more known to non-natives during the Standing Rock encampment was, Water is the first medicine. It is true.
Where I come from we cleanse ourselves in the river. Not like a bath with soap. I mean: the water makes us strong and able to move forward into what is set before us to do with good energy.
We cannot live good, we cannot live at all, without water.
If we poison and use up our water, how will we cleanse ourselves of these sins?
~
To thirst and to drink is how one knows they are alive, and grateful.
To thirst and then not drink is …
~
If your builder could place a small red bird in your chest to beat as your heart, is it so hard for you to picture the blue river hurtling inside the slow muscled curves of my long body? Is it too difficult to believe it is as sacred as a breath or a star or a sidewinder or your own mother or your lover?
If I could convince you, would our brown bodies and our blue rivers be more loved and less ruined?
The Whanganui river in New Zealand now has the same legal rights of a human being. In India, the Ganges and Yamuna rivers now have the same legal status of a human being. Slovenia’s constitution now declares access to clean drinking water to be a national human right. While in the U.S., we are tear-gassing and rubber-bulleting and kenneling natives trying to protect their water from pollution and contamination at Standing Rock in North Dakota. We have yet to discover what the effects of lead contaminated water will be on the children of Flint, Michigan who have been drinking it for years.
~
We think of our bodies as being all that we are: I am my body. This thinking helps us disrespect water, air, land, one another. But water is not external from our body, our self.
My Elder says: Cut off your ear, and you will live. Cut off your hand, you will live. Cut off your leg, you can still live. Cut off our water: we will not live more than a week.
The water we drink, like the air we breathe, is not a part of our body but is our body. What we do to one—to the body, to the water—we do to the other.
~
Toni Morrison writes, All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was. Back to the body of earth, of flesh, back to the mouth, the throat, back to the womb, back to the heart, to its blood, back to our grief, back back back to when we were more than we have lately become.
Will we soon remember from where we’ve come? The water.
And once remembered, will we return to that first water, and in doing so return to ourselves, to each other, better and cleaner?
Do you think the water will forget what we have done, what we continue to do?
TREVINO L. BRINGS PLENTY
Trevino L. Brings Plenty was born on the Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation, Eagle Butte, South Dakota. A Minneconjou Lakota, he grew up in the San Francisco Bay area and Portland, Oregon, where he now resides. Brings Plenty is a filmmaker and musician, and has been a social worker, college instructor, and advocate for Native families and students.
Real Indian Junk Jewelry (2012) is Brings Plenty’s first poetry collection. He has since published Wakpa Wanagi Ghost River (2015).
For the Sake of Beauty
On the phone I asked her to wear a full buckskin outfit and she could be the beauty that would make me steal horses.
She said she didn’t have a buckskin outfit.
I said I would make her one, but use pages from books.
A week later when she came over to my place, she asked if I had made an outfit.
I said no. I couldn’t bring myself to hunt the books on my shelf, even if it were for food or clothing. I couldn’t bring myself to kill, even for the sake of beauty.
The Sound of It
When you spoke of it you sounded the explosion, the skyline, love’s water rush, the wilted fist, the scream of a desert, the cracked moon, and oblivion’s color. You spoke of the dark, blue night around my eyes.
Part Gravel, Part Water, All Indian
It’s not by accident
I live in a city.
It was calculated:
