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.
