by Joy Harjo
great-uncle—my Uvah—I imagine my Aupa
looked like you when he was younger,
deep, dark skin and half-moon smile
gleaming, you laugh the same laugh—huh huh huh huh!
Did your heart break, as his, leaving the island—
he stayed an extra winter, left his eldest children
in Nome for school, lived on Ugiuvak—the place for winter—with Auka
and their smallest children—
Mom, age four, was there—and that 16mm
camera recording the last winter
of his traditional life.
Recording that last winter to convince the BIA to send another teacher.
The film was ruined by the August storms.
They wouldn’t have watched it anyway.
Those fuckers.
O God, reading Aupa’s accounts ruptures
everything forever.
Aupa never sings.
But sing, Gabriel, sing, sing grandpa’s song.
Mom and Aya Margaret will stand up to dance.
We welcome everyone to dance with us.
—
You all broke, I know, everyone shattered
Auka and Aupa and their sad kitchen life,
eyes graying the straight, dusty streets of
Nome.
Everybody lost themselves in drink for years.
Some are still lost.
—
Sing, Gabriel, sing.
How beautiful our women are—
wearing floral ugithqoks,
dancing—that passionate precision—
your Frances, Auka, Marie, Mom, Margaret, Caroline, Marilyn,
and your granddaughters—in a line—motions memorized.
And then, the song is over.
They move back to their seats.
Please, Uvah, as we always do,
sing the song again, a second time,
and a second time they will stand up to dance.
ABIGAIL CHABITNOY (1987–), Koniag and Tangirnaq, earned her MFA from Colorado State University, where she was a Crow-Tremblay fellow. A winner of the 2017 Locked Horn Press Poetry Prize, she published her first poetry collection, How to Dress a Fish, in 2019. Of Germanic and Aleut descent, she is a Koniag descendant and member of the Tangirnaq Native Village in Kodiak, Alaska, and grew up in Pennsylvania.
Anatomy of a Wave
It had everything and nothing to do
with mettle
fire before flint before
How many bodies will a lead ball move
through?
How many men can one stand in a row?
When the tide went out, they had nowhere to run
but that was many years ago, and if they have not died they live
happily still.
But you and I know that’s not how the story goes.
I wake more ghosts each morning:
when I was born my mother and father
planted a tree west of the garden.
We ripped it out when I left home—
its roots never took,
its limbs harbored mold in the sticky east wind.
We used to think a weak spine
was inherited
but consider the shark
how some will stop swimming
in their sleep.
How does the forecast change?
We make weather with our teeth.
Why should I be afraid of the sea?
Let the toothed skin lie
if it asks too many bones.
Wait for the waves
to start skipping,
Tie down the drifters and stretch the stomach before the fall.
Don’t turn your back on the water.
What else grows on an island
without trees?
The need to make
makes body—
Others have seen water act this way before,
it was many years ago,
how many bodies a single wave can carry,
how many relatives, casually.
They tied their boats to the tops of trees
so the water wouldn’t lose them,
so the story goes.
Some say it was a boat that killed them, Vasiley and Akelina. Bad heart, traumatized. Accidently.
I’m telling you what happens. Nikifor missed the boat.
Imagine what it might be like
when the waters come
to be a fish
to be twelve strong, to be six, two hundred, or forty
sharks swimming toward you—
NO‘U REVILLA (1987–), Kanaka Maoli and Tahitian, is a queer poet, educator, editor, and performing artist from Kahului, Maui. Her chapbook Say Throne was published in 2011. She served as poetry editor of the Hawaiʻi Review and organized the first Aloha‘Āina Zine workshop in solidarity with the protectors of Mauna Kea in 2015. She earned her PhD in English from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, where she is now an assistant professor of English, teaching creative writing.
Smoke Screen
for every hard-working father who ever worked
at HC&S, especially mine
Was he a green, long sleeve
jacket & god-fearing man?
On the job, bloodshot.
Marrying metal in his heavy
gloves, bringing justice to his father,
who was also a smoking man.
No bathroom breaks, no helmets, no safe words.
He whistled sugarcane through his neck,
through his unventilated wife,
his chronic black ash daughters.
This is what a burn schedule looks like.
And if believing in god was a respiratory issue,
he was like his father.
Marrying metal to make a family.
At home he smoked before he slept.
In the corner with the door
ajar, cigarette poised like a first-born:
well-behaved, rehearsed.
Curtains drawn, bedrooms medicated.
He was always burning into something.
Part-dark, part-pupils.
For my father, the night was best alone.
When only he could see through
the world and forgive it.
MICHAEL WASSON (1990–), Nimíipuu, Nez Perce , completed his MFA at Oregon State University and currently teaches conversation-based English courses off the coast of Japan. He is the author of Self-Portrait with Smeared Centuries (Éditions des Lisières, 2018), translated into French by Béatrice Machet, and This American Ghost (2017). His awards include a Native Arts and Cultures Foundation Artist Fellowship in Literature and the Adrienne Rich Award for Poetry.
A Poem for the háawtnin’ &
héwlekipx [The Holy Ghost
of You, the Space & Thin Air]
’inept’ipéecwise cilaakt: (I am wanting to) hold a wake / (I am wanting to) hold the body
Had this body been made
of nothing
but its bright skeleton & autumn-
blown skin
I would shut my eyes
into butterfly wings
on a mapped earth. Had the gods
even their own gods, I could re-
learn the very shape
of my face in a puddle of sky-
colored rain. Extinction is
to the hands
as the lips are
to the first gesture
the tongue carves into the slick mouth
just before
prayer. In every way
the world fails
to light the soft inner
machine & marrow
of the bones in motion — 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
&n
bsp; snowfall. This night —
like any fleshed boy I dream
of a lyre strung
with the torn hair of hímiin &
in place
of my dried mouth — there
it is. Whispers
in the blue-black dark after c’álalal
c’álalal reach out
toward my teeth to strum
this wilting instrument. &
once awake, I’m holding
its frame to build
a window back in-
to the world. Had this body
been held after all
these years, I would enter
you to find my frozen self
& touch. Like the gutted animal
we take
in offering. & live.
JAMAICA HEOLIMELEIKALANI OSORIO (1991–), Kanaka Maoli, is a poet, performance artist, scholar, and activist from Pālolo, Oʻahu, who is widely known for her spoken-word poetry. She has performed across five continents and was invited to the White House to perform by President and Mrs. Barack Obama in 2009. She was awarded a Ford Foundation fellowship in 2017, earned her PhD in English in 2018, and is now an assistant professor of Indigenous Politics at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa.
Kumulipo
What happens to the ones forgotten
the ones who shaped my heart from their rib cages
i want to taste the tears in their names
trace their souls into my vocal chords so that i can feel related again
because i have forgotten my own grandparents’ middle names
Forgotten what color thread god used to sew me together with
There is a culture
Somewhere beneath my skin that i’ve been searching for since i landed here
But it’s hard to feel sometimes
Because at Stanford we are innovative
the city of Macintosh breeds thinkers of tomorrow
and i have forgotten how to remember
But our roots cannot remember themselves
Cannot remember how to dance if we don’t chant for them
And will not sing unless we are listening
but our tongues feel too foreign in our own mouths
we don’t dare speak out loud
and we can’t even remember our own parents’ names
so who will care to remember mine if I don’t teach them
i want to teach my future children
how to spell family with my middle name—Heolimeleikalani
how to hold love with Kamakawiwo‘ole
how to taste culture in the Kumulipo
please
do not forget me
my father
Kamakawiwo‘ole
who could not forget his own
Leialoha
do not forget what’s left
cuz this is all we have
and you won’t find our roots online
We have no dances or chants if we have no history
just rants
no roots
just tears
this is all i have of our family history
and now it’s yours
ʻO Maʻalolaninui ke kāneʻo Lonokaumakahiki ka wahine
Noho pū lāua a hānau iaʻo Imaikalani he Kāne
ʻO Imaikalani ke kāneʻo Kekoʻokalani ka wahine
Noho pū lāua a hānau ia ʻo Paʻaluhi Kahinuonalani he kāne
ʻO Paʻaluhi Kahinuonalani ke kāneʻo Piʻipiʻi Kealiʻiwaiwaiʻole ka wahine
Noho pū lāua a hānau iā‘o Charles Moses Kamakawiwoʻole ʻo Kamehameha ke kane
ʻO Hainaloa ke kāne ʻo Niau ka wahine
Noho pū lāua a hāneu ia ʻo Kaluaihonolulu ka wahine
ʻO Kaluaihonolulu ka wahine ʻo Nakoʻoka ke kāne
Noho pū lāua a hānau ia ʻo Kapahu he wahine
ʻO Kapahu ka wahine ʻo Kua ke kāne
Noho pū lāua a hānau ia ʻo Daisy Kealiʻiʻaiawaawa he wahine [Koholālele]
ʻO Charles Moses Kamakawiwoʻoleʻo Kamehameha ke kāne ʻo
Daisy Kealiʻiaiʻawaʻawa ka wahine
Noho pū lāua a hānau ia ʻo Eliza Leialoha Kamakawiwoʻole he wahine [Kukuihaele]
ʻO Eliza Leialoha Kamakawiwoʻole ka wahine ʻo Emil Montero Osorio ke kāne [Hilo]
Noho pū lāua a hānau ʻia ʻo Elroy Thomas Leialoha Osorio he kāne
ʻO Manūawai ke kāne ʻo Keao ka wahine [South Kona & Kohala]
Noho pū lāua a hānau ia ʻo Sarah Piʻikea Papanui he wahine
ʻO Sarah Piʻikea Papanui ka wahine ʻo Kam Sheong Akiona
ke kāne
Noho pū lāua a hānau ia ʻo Nani Kaluahine Kimoe Akiona he wahine
ʻO Nani Kaluahine Kimoe Akiona ka wahine ʻo LeRoy Adam Anthony Kay
ke kāne
Noho pū lāua a hānau ia ʻo Clara Kuʻulei Kay he wahine
ʻO Elroy Thomas Leialoha Osorio ke kāne ʻo Clara Kuʻulei Kay ka wahine
Noho pū lāua a hānau ia ʻo Jonathan Kay Kamakawiwoʻole Osorio he kāne
ʻO Jonathan Kay Kamakawiwoʻole Osorio ke kāne ʻo Mary Carol Dunn ka wahine
Noho pū lāua a hānau ia ʻo Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio
do not forget us
mai poina
SOUTHWEST AND WEST
“I’M HERE TO MAKE A POEM”
Deborah A. Miranda
WRITING THE INTRODUCTION to this section feels like writing a love letter about a collection of love letters. For these poets, home is the land currently called California, Nevada, Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona, embraced by the Pacific Ocean and bordered by desert, mountains, a river, a gulf—and by an artificial boundary where ancestral crossings were once the norm.
As we journey through this poetic space, languages ripple like mountain ranges: Diné, Western Apache, Yaqui. Spanish seeps in, legacy of early colonization left behind like a worn scar; English gets pulled and stretched into Indigenous syntax and rhythms, as older languages like Keres, Cahuilla, Esselen, Mojave, Kumeyaay, Yurok, Chumash, Yuman, and Koyongk’awi push up against English like submerged rivers, slowly and relentlessly indigenizing the footprint of another colonial invader.
Walking through these poems is also a kind of homecoming. In a literal sense, our bodies carry traces of where we were born and raised: oxygen isotopes from the water we drank as children are stored within the buds of our teeth, formed before birth or during childhood. The poems in this volume carry, within their words and white spaces, indelible traces of the place where we emerged. They tell the stories inside of us, our histories, dreams, struggles, pain, joy, moments of peace and clarity. At the same time, these poems bear us forward into what comes next, the futures we rise to meet or take in our hands, carve out for coming generations.
Despite all stereotypes to the contrary, Indians do not only exist in, and only honor, the past; we also work toward and build our futures. “And realms our tribes were crushed to get / May be our barren desert yet,” Arsenius Chaleco, Yuma, writes in “The Indian Requiem”—seemingly an elegy about defeat. But the closing lines reveal the speaker’s intention to endure beyond the end of Euro-Americans; “our barren desert,” he says. Despite the ways this earth may be dishonored and violated by settlers, Chaleco’s poem is an “Indian requiem” for colonization, not for Indigenous cultures. We will be here for the healing to come.
Still, endurance isn’t easy. Simon Ortiz, Acoma Pueblo, expresses the pain of constant occupation in his poem “Indian Guys at the Bar”: “I don’t know if my feet can make it; / my soul is where it has always been; / my heart is staggering somewhere in between.” Ortiz, along with Natalie Diaz, Tommy Pico, Adrian C. Louis, and others in this collection, illustrates the ways alcohol and trauma have been weaponized to separate the people from the land. This brutal separation is a weight carried by these hard-working poets, and it breaks our hearts even as it empowers us toward the truth about the realities of heroic recovery.
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Other poems, like Koyongk’awi Linda Noel’s “Lesson in Fire,” rise to reaffirm the depth of Indigenous knowledge: passed on from father to daughter are not just the mechanics of building “a good fire,” but the way to “tend” that fire so that the gifts inside wood are released. The knowledge that wood possesses literally warms the air the speaker breathes in, passing on different kinds of lessons, teaching her wonder and gratitude. The thickly forested homelands of Noel’s Northern California people reside in this poem. Georgiana Valoyce-Sanchez (Chumash, Tohono O’odham, and Pima) speaks of the ocean’s presence for California coastal tribes in “The Dolphin Walking Stick,” which serves as an elegy for her father. “As he walks / strings of seashells clack softly / as when ocean waves tumble / rocks and shells and / the gentle clacking song / follows each wave / as it pulls back into / the sea,” Valoyce-Sanchez writes, creating an ocean on the page as music for her father’s story.
Tribal people of the Southwest and West have survived many efforts by Euro-Americans to appropriate the land and remove Indigenous lives from the organic ebb and flow of migrations, cyclical and seasonal movements, and trade routes—all ways of being in relationship with this planet. Strangely enough, when faced with the wide-open spaces of this part of the continent, the Euro-American’s first response was to erect fences! “The Wall” by Anita Endrezze (Yaqui) best illustrates the ridiculous nature of artificial boundaries and the violence of racist politics. Responding to the clueless campaign promise of a politician, Endrezze’s list of possible building materials begins with “saguaros,/ butterflies, and bones/ of those who perished/ in the desert.” Next, her construction materials grow to include the debris of capitalism: “A Lego wall or bubble wrap” where “dreams will be terrorists.” Parody, sarcasm, cynicism, and whimsy, along with chocolate and “hummingbird warriors,” become her mortar, leading us to the stunning image of a “2,000 mile altar”—and beyond. Part warning, part prophecy, this poem asserts that Indigenous people on both sides of that border will outlive any wall.
