by Joy Harjo
stonewall it had not a penny
thats not true it had several pennies
can you make a sovereign nation a national park how condescending
instead just tell them to honor the treaty
what can poetry do it
cant not not do nothing
it must undulate w/ the 2:30 pm dance music the sole
patrons at stonewall
there was a shooting in ohio today
the music made me feel a little anxious it was
hard thumping dance music a notch
upwards of 100 bpm notoriously the beat of life
the optimum tempo for cpr
I consider downloading a metronome real quick to test it to tap it out but
I don’t want to be ‘anywhere near’ my phone
meaning it’s in my bag on the stool 2 feet from me
there is an amy winehouse video on no sound at least
I think it is amy winehouse
she is at a funeral black and white
there is a stuffed bird slightly obscuring my view of the tv
it looks like a kind of tall pigeon w/ mottled brown
and russet with a white ringlet necklace and black dots
is it a carrier pigeon I wonder I sent
a text to jocelyn at standing rock several texts
are you still on the road
ariana and i r gonna go out there in december
sending love to you
tried calling bt yr mailbox is full
send a sign when u can xoxo
howdy. thinking of u w love.
hope all is well. send smoke
signal telegram carrier pigeon
send love to my twospirits at the
winyan camp.
last night we prayed for her and for zephyr and l. frank &
the twospirits especially at standing rock
there’s no sign of that struggle here but they are selling tshirts commemorating
the other and the six days of riots
led by transwomen of color they later tried to whitewash in that terrible movie
like it was all these hot angry upright downright forthright white gays so ready
for the revolution
and now people are treating standing rock like burning man
a drink called goslings
videos by the pigeon misaligned with the music
the smell of booze in the air made both of us recoil slightly I saw
or felt it
I’m here to make a poem I was already paid for when I had less than $2 in
my bank account (and I joked I would go right to the bar and buy every-
body drinks) not even enough for a subway ride and I used the 58 cents I’d
gotten for busking for the first time alone in the long hallway between the
library at bryant park and the orange line trains by the ovid quote ‘gutta
cavat lapidem’ water (or a drop of water really) hollows out
a stone. lapidum a stone or rock ariana once described cd wright’s style
as lapidary
I loved this as a description of writing like the hieroglyphics are
literally lapidary and I told my grandmother about it as we
were driving from mescalero to albuquerque she knew all about the
plants and the names for all the rockforms mesas or buttes or
ziggurats and I said how do
you know all these she said by long observation and
I used to study geology in college I wanted to major in it
but they wouldn’t allow women
to major in the hard sciences then so she
began to study religion
tho she already had medicine
ricky martin on the beach
or is it someone younger sexier
the grand canyon splitting apart
is it an ad is it a video
even the sands at the beach
are bouncing with the beat
the tempo has stayed very similar this whole time a tick
up I suspect from 100bpm
BOJAN LOUIS (1981–), Diné, was born in Window Rock, Arizona, in the Navajo Nation. He was the inaugural Virginia G. Piper fellow-in-residence at Arizona State University, former editor for RED INK: An International Journal of Indigenous Literature, Arts, & Humanities, and co-founder of the journal Waxwing. His debut poetry collection, Currents (2017), won the American Book Award. Louis is an assistant professor in creative writing and American Indian Studies at the University of Arizona.
If Nothing, the Land
i. the toughest sheriff in the world
There is no other bad than what I say’s bad.
It’s tough-living on this land. Miles of desert,
undeveloped; the interstates, mostly unmanned,
are threads unspooled down broad hallways.
Beyond their edge: the space is dead,
a rogue trailer or redskin reservation.
Backward problems
of methamphetamine and rape. Those doors
have their own police, their own dumb justice.
I concern my posse with invasion. Paperless
beaners. Rust that ruins a polish.
Inedible animals doing no man any good,
unless buried to cease the flies and the stink.
ii. flock of Seagals
If not thousands then millions of hours
I’ve played bang-bang; nabbed bad guy
brownies in kung fu-grip shoot-em-ups.
Who’s better fit to patrol kids in tiny pants
than a convicted man? Limits,
like borders, stretch thin and tear. If anyone
can get a gun then shouldn’t everyone
have one at the ready, like in the glory days:
a round up of savages, spics, and spooks out
to devalue our kids, good at killing their own.
I learned from watching birds nestled within
cacti: though there might be many, a single bird
more makes another cavity, an eventual collapse.
iii. come mierda para el desayuno
Chickens dismantle, like pit crews can
a vehicle, scorpions quickly.
Urged forward by pickers hens bob
and amble over fallen oranges, bruised grapefruit;
seek pincers, stingers, exoskeletons;
their work urgent and efficient.
Back at the coop stubborn roosters fight,
bloody, and unfeather each other
until the losers peck frail chicks from the clutch,
strew limp bodies beneath fluorescent light.
The hens return, squawk and circle the carcasses,
until the migrants transfer them in sacks
meant for citrus to anonymous holes on the land.
TACEY M. ATSITTY (1982–), Diné, is Tsénahabiłnii (Sleep Rock People) and born for Ta’neeszahnii (Tangle People). Her maternal grandfather is Tábąąhí (Water Edge People) and her paternal grandfather is Hashk’áánhadzóhí (Yucca Fruit Strung-Out-In-A-Line People). Atsitty earned her MFA from Cornell University. Her awards and fellowships include a Truman Capote creative writing fellowship and the Philip Freund Prize. Her first poetry collection is Rain Scald.
Sonnet for My Wrist
I tend to mistake your ribs for a hand towel,
it hangs on a nail above the washbowl, the hand towel,
ripped. There’s something wearing about the end curve
of thread. When I sleep I keep my palms open. Verve:
we were lovers in a field of gray. In Navajo, we say something
rote: I’ll radical when you hurt me something
close, even you waft—it’s best I tether, forget flyaways
I plucked. My bones, they lay, to me, like fray. Like gaunt:
I don’t crawl back for fragments, even a spinal cord
of sinew—it’s not going to close. You rope<
br />
me from stray to grip: it’s all for naught. I’m born
for my father, Tangle People. Our mouths in webs:
tonight my wrists part, and you chase
my insides until they dangle into pieces.
Rain Scald
When standing (in rain) for so long, you no longer hear
or feel it falling—you believe it’s stopped. Step away—
look to your (skin; muck itch. It’s a) shame, your hands
have gone bald from fungus. Taking you to (what’s beneath scab,
to) one of those nights when you know (your gums will bleed.
To say) it’s been a while or it has to do with (wrist mange
is to say rot comes so easily now, skin weep—) lapse. Step through
the whole (black of your home) and still know damp, know
(exactly when to bend your finger for) the light switch.
‘ ‘ ‘
so familiar (in aubade)
shame, your hands
have gone haywire. Taking you to (what’s beneath rust: ranges
they’ve grazed—) a time
when you’re combed through
when you know your knuckles—
and all that rain has swallowed.
NATALIE DIAZ (1982–), Mojave/Gila River, was born at the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California. She attended Old Dominion University, where she played point-guard for the women’s basketball team, reaching the NCAA Final Four, and earned her MFA in poetry and fiction. When My Brother Was an Aztec, her debut collection, was published in 2012. She is the winner of the Narrative Poetry Prize, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, and a MacArthur Fellowship. She is currently the Maxine and Jonathan Marshall Chair in Modern and Contemporary Poetry at Arizona State University.
It Was the Animals
Today my brother brought over a piece of the ark
wrapped in a white plastic grocery bag.
He set the bag on my dining table, unknotted it,
peeled it away, revealing a foot-long fracture of wood.
He took a step back and gestured toward it
with his arms and open palms —
It’s the ark, he said.
You mean Noah’s ark? I asked.
What other ark is there? he answered.
Read the inscription, he told me,
it tells what’s going to happen at the end.
What end? I wanted to know.
He laughed, What do you mean, “what end”?
The end end.
Then he lifted it out. The plastic bag rattled.
His fingers were silkened by pipe blisters.
He held the jagged piece of wood so gently.
I had forgotten my brother could be gentle.
He set it on the table the way people on television
set things when they’re afraid those things might blow-up
or go-off — he set it right next to my empty coffee cup.
It was no ark —
it was the broken end of a picture frame
with a floral design carved into its surface.
He put his head in his hands —
I shouldn’t show you this —
God, why did I show her this?
It’s ancient — O, God,
this is so old.
Fine, I gave in, Where did you get it?
The girl, he said. O, the girl.
What girl? I asked.
You’ll wish you never knew, he told me.
I watched him drag his wrecked fingers
over the chipped flower-work of the wood —
You should read it. But, O, you can’t take it —
no matter how many books you’ve read.
He was wrong. I could take the ark.
I could even take his marvelously fucked fingers.
The way they almost glittered.
It was the animals — the animals I could not take —
they came up the walkway into my house,
cracked the doorframe with their hooves and hips,
marched past me, into my kitchen, into my brother,
tails snaking across my feet before disappearing
like retracting vacuum cords into the hollows
of my brother’s clavicles, tusks scraping the walls,
reaching out for him — wildebeests, pigs,
the oryxes with their black matching horns,
javelinas, jaguars, pumas, raptors. The ocelots
with their mathematical faces. So many kinds of goat.
So many kinds of creature.
I wanted to follow them, to get to the bottom of it,
but my brother stopped me —
This is serious, he said.
You have to understand.
It can save you.
So I sat down, with my brother wrecked open like that,
and two-by-two the fantastical beasts
parading him. I sat, as the water fell against my ankles,
built itself up around me, filled my coffee cup
before floating it away from the table.
My brother — teeming with shadows —
a hull of bones, lit only by tooth and tusk,
lifting his ark high in the air.
When My Brother Was an Aztec
he lived in our basement and sacrificed my parents
every morning. It was awful. Unforgivable. But they kept coming
back for more. They loved him, was all they could say.
It started with him stumbling along la Avenida de los Muertos,
my parents walking behind him like effigies in a procession
he might burn to the ground at any moment. They didn’t know
what else to do except be there to pick him up when he died.
They forgot who was dying, who was already dead. My brother
quit wearing shirts when a carnival of dirty-breasted women
made him their leader, following him up and down the stairs—
They were acrobats, moving, twitching like snakes—They fed him
crushed diamonds and fire. He gobbled the gifts. My parents
begged him to pluck their eyes out. He thought he was
Huitzilopochtli, a god, half-man half-hummingbird. My parents
at his feet, wrecked honeysuckles, he lowered his swordlike mouth,
gorged on them, draining color until their eyebrows whitened.
My brother shattered and quartered them before his basement festivals—
waving their shaking hearts in his fists,
while flea-ridden dogs ran up and down the steps, licking their asses,
turning tricks. Neighbors were amazed my parents’ hearts kept
growing back—It said a lot about my parents, or parents’ hearts.
My brother flung them into cenotes, dropped them from cliffs,
punched holes into their skulls like useless jars or vases,
broke them to pieces and fed them to gods ruling
the ratty crotches of street fair whores with pocked faces
spreading their thighs in flophouses with no electricity. He slept
in filthy clothes smelling of rotten peaches and matches, fell in love
with sparkling spoonfuls the carnival dog-women fed him. My parents
lost their appetites for food, for sons. Like all bad kings, my brother
wore a crown, a green baseball cap turned backwards
with a Mexican flag embroidered on it. When he wore it
in the front yard, which he treated like his personal zócolo,
all his realm knew he had the power that day, had all the jewels
a king could eat or smoke or shoot. The slave girls came
to the fence and ate out of his hands. He fed them maíz
through the chain links. My parents watched from the window,
crying over their house turned zoo, their son who was
now a rusted cage. The Aztec held court in a salt cedar grove
>
across the street where peacocks lived. My parents crossed fingers
so he’d never come back, lit novena candles
so he would. He always came home with turquoise and jade
feathers and stinking of peacock shit. My parents gathered
what he’d left of their bodies, trying to stand without legs,
trying to defend his blows with missing arms, searching for their fingers
to pray, to climb out of whatever dark belly my brother, the Aztec,
their son, had fed them to.
TOMMY PICO (1984–), Kumeyaay, was born and raised on the Viejas Reservation and now divides his time between Los Angeles and Brooklyn. He is the author of the poetry collections IRL, Nature Poem, Junk, and Feed. Pico has been the recipient of numerous fellowships and awards, including a Lambda Literary fellowship, a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship, an American Book Award, and a Whiting Award. Currently, he is a contributing editor at the website Literary Hub, and he cohosts the podcast Food 4 Thot.
from Nature Poem
Like poison oak or the Left Eye part in “Waterfalls”
you become a little bit of everything you brush
against. Today I am a handful of raisins and abt 15 ppl on the water taxi.
When my dad texts me two cousins dead this week, one 26 the other
30, what I’m really trying to understand is what trainers @ the gym
mean when they say “engage” in the phrase “engage your core”
also “core”
restless terms batted back and forth.
Rest is a sign of necrosis. Life is a cycle of jobs. The biosphere is alive
with menthol smoke and my unchecked voicemails. I, for one, used to
believe in God
and comment boards
I wd say how far I am from my mountains, tell you why I carry
Kumeyaay basket designs on my body, or how freakishly routine it is to
