by Joy Harjo
She had horses who had books of names.
She had some horses.
She had horses who whispered in the dark, who were afraid to speak.
She had horses who screamed out of fear of the silence, who
carried knives to protect themselves from ghosts.
She had horses who waited for destruction.
She had horses who waited for resurrection.
She had some horses.
She had horses who got down on their knees for any savior.
She had horses who thought their high price had saved them.
She had horses who tried to save her, who climbed in her
bed at night and prayed.
She had some horses.
She had some horses she loved.
She had some horses she hated.
These were the same horses.
Rabbit Is Up to Tricks
In a world long before this one, there was enough for everyone,
Until somebody got out of line.
We heard it was Rabbit, fooling around with clay and wind.
Everybody was tired of his tricks and no one would play with him;
He was lonely in this world.
So Rabbit thought to make a person.
And when he blew into the mouth of the crude figure to see
What would happen,
The clay man stood up.
Rabbit showed the clay man how to steal a chicken.
The clay man obeyed.
Rabbit showed him how to steal corn.
The clay man obeyed.
Then he showed him how to steal someone else’s wife.
The clay man obeyed.
Rabbit felt important and powerful.
Clay man felt important and powerful.
And once that clay man started he could not stop.
Once he took that chicken he wanted all the chickens.
And once he took that corn he wanted all the corn.
And once he took that wife, he wanted all the wives.
He was insatiable.
Then he had a taste of gold and he wanted all the gold.
Then it was land and anything else he saw.
His wanting only made him want more.
Soon it was countries, then it was trade.
The wanting infected the earth.
We lost track of the purpose and reason for life.
We began to forget our songs. We forgot our stories.
We could no longer see or hear our ancestors,
Or talk with each other across the kitchen table.
Forests were being mowed down all over the world.
And Rabbit had no place to play.
Rabbit’s trick had backfired.
Rabbit tried to call the clay man back,
But when the clay man wouldn’t listen
Rabbit realized he’d made a clay man with no ears.
KIM SHUCK (1966–), Cherokee, was born in San Francisco and belongs to the Northern California Cherokee diaspora. She earned her BA in art and MFA in textiles from San Francisco State University. The author of several books of poetry, including Smuggling Cherokee and Deer Trails, Shuck is also known for her award-winning weaving and beadwork. She is a recipient of a 2019 National Laureate Fellowship and is the seventh poet laureate of San Francisco.
Water as a Sense of Place
1.
The water I used to drink spent time
Inside a pitched basket
It adopted the internal shape
Took on the taste of pine
And changed me forever.
I remember
Carrying that basket from the pump,
The slow swell of the damp roots,
Sway of a walk
That made carrying it easier.
Sometimes I imagine Step’s Ford,
Both in and out of flood,
Tar Creek,
Spring River
In and out of baskets.
Gram’s hands
Long, smooth fingers powerful and exact
Pull and twist
Sorting spokes and splitting weavers
Constructing my idea of water.
2.
I forgot to ask for the name
Of the creek that used to run through
What is now my backyard.
They piped it under,
But with enough rain
It remembers where to go.
Returns to shift
Mud and
Retaining walls.
It is, I imagine,
Referred to somewhere downtown
By the number of its pipe.
3.
Early training holds fast.
I sleep with water to the East of me,
Wake humming or singing
And go to water.
Bareheaded
In all but the most violent rainstorms
A connection I cannot give up
My hair and lashes glittering at first then weighed down.
I throw my windows open to the rain and
Lean out into the shock of contact.
Water so thick in the air
All but my closest neighbors are erased.
Rain is not an emergency
Not in October
Not in this place
I take it in breath by breath.
CHIP LIVINGSTON (1967–), Mvskoke, was born and raised in Florida. He is the author of two collections of poetry, a novel, and a collection of short stories and creative nonfiction. He has received awards from the Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas, Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers, and the Arch and Bruce Brown Foundation. He teaches at the low-residency MFA in Creative Writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe and lives in Uruguay.
A Proposal
I am a young man, Fire. You
are a young man, Wood. Listen,
I will go with you. In the air,
I enter, ancient. You in the smoke.
Kingfisher just kissed you.
The green frog, he just kissed you.
The dragonfly, wood, water, stone.
Choices are frequently made through inspiration.
A cloth, a chair, a walking stick.
Various symbols to elevate you.
The little white dog made footprints.
You and I just hold up the stars.
MARIANNE AWEAGON BROYLES (1970–), Cherokee, grew up in Tennessee. The author of The Red Window, she lives in Rio Rancho, New Mexico, and works as a psychiatric nurse in Albuquerque.
Trespassing
Warning signs dot edges of woods, rocky coasts and tell us NO
with letters in red, black, reflective silver and gold.
They are nailed on fences, hang from ropes, or planted
in the ground—something that will never grow.
My mother used to pull them like a spoiled root vegetable
from their staked claim of land and use them for kindling
between logs to make the fire burn longer and hotter.
The next morning, only ashes and maybe an orange
ember or two remain to be soaked with water and gathered
up with a shovel and thrown back to the earth we only think is our own.
STACY PRATT (1975–), Mvskoke, is a former English professor and now a freelance writer and singer-songwriter living in Tulsa.
A Creek Woman Beside Lake Ontario
Here, too, a great gold snake
writhes beneath the water,
his head at the shore, looking for us.
And is that him, riding the mist
in lines like subway commuters
rising up through the ground
into an entire other day?
He’s brought me east,
to Black River Bay,
and so far the land has not swallowed
up our children.
But if he shoots another arrow in the morning,
I w
ill follow it all the way
to the sun’s house before turning around.
I go where he sends me.
I never stray entirely from the circled houses,
the old bones, the ball fields,
the pots of corn hanging over fires in the night,
the stories he keeps repeating
from inside my own body.
SANTEE FRAZIER (1978–), Cherokee, is the author of Dark Thirty (2009) and Aurum (2019). The inaugural School for Advanced Research Indigenous Writer in Residence fellow, his additional honors include the Lannan Foundation Residency Fellowship, Syracuse University Fellowship, the Fine Arts Work Center’s Archie D. and Bertha H. Walker Foundation Scholarship, and a 2014 Native Arts and Cultures Foundation Fellowship. He directs the low-residency MFA in Creative Writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe.
Sun Perch
It is late, but outside the night is glowing with snow and streetlight, quiet
but for the growl and skid of the plows. Winter, Syracuse, where the feinting
snow fusses and scatters until it collapses roofs and power lines.
And now sitting in that gauzy light, nothing but the sounds of sleep, my son’s
cub-like snore, I am reminded my childhood was spent in another city, alone,
a boy who knew evenings only by the gradual blackening behind buildings,
jar bugs pinging electric poles, from the street curb hearing the clink of dishes,
chuckles of supper. I remember a fish staring blankly from the center
of a round plate rimmed with almond-eyed bluebirds—wings extended,
mid-flap—the fish, perhaps lightly steamed, then wok-fried, charred
along the belly, fins crisped, mouth open from its last breath, fossilized
in a reduction of fish sauce and honey—next to the plate, a bowl of steamed rice.
I sat at the table waiting, not knowing how to eat the fish or rice with chopsticks,
smiling as best I could while in Vietnamese John explained that I lived three blocks away,
that I had been home alone for days. His father looked at me as he left the kitchen,
wearing the shirt of a machinist, “Paul” sewn in above the right pocket. Later, I would learn
he worked three jobs, and on his only day off, Sunday, after mass, he would drive
his family to some far away lake outside the city, where they would reel in sun perch
and net them boat side.
The smells of cooking oil and aromatics fading, John translated
for his mother who asked me to sleepover, and I said, no thank you, smiled, walked
home to whatever misfortune awaited in that dark house, where the plumbing was empty,
my bed a palette of blankets on the living room floor. I said no, not out of shame,
but because I wanted to lie down and remember how I’d used my fingers to scrape
flesh off bones—skin tearing with it—and how I trembled when asked to eat the eyes,
fins and tail.
I remember now, how in the throes of labor my wife looked at me,
how she gripped my hand when the pain ruptured up, and how through it all,
behind the brown webbing of her pupils, there was gentleness.
When our son
finally came, he could not breathe, he was blue, motionless. I remember the midwife
rushing him off, and minutes later hearing gasping bawl. I didn’t know what I saw, as my son
shivered, hands gnarled, locked in cry, still blind from birth, breathing underneath a plastic dome.
When I think of it now—the drive to that far away lake, my first catch flopping in the boat,
and later jerking the hook from its mouth—the perch must have stunned at the sudden
uselessness of its gills, and as I watched it gasp against the hull of the boat, I wished
what all boys wished for, a way of remembering how air rushes from your body
after being socked in the gut, and how to sit in the dark, alone, when streetlight
is just enough for a boy to make shapes with his hands, a play made of light, light made of snow.
The Carnival
I studied every ride on the midway—
watched them groan, twirling
light into blur, the Ferris wheel’s
last passengers pointing out
from their seats to town’s end.
These monuments that have risen
between the hills, to be forgotten
as the lights go out. Where was she
in this hazy night? Maybe half-lit
in Red-Oak Bar, leaning on a man,
wedged between his thighs. I wonder
what it is to dream of autumn,
balled up on a park bench,
the tilt-a-whirl in my gaze,
wanting a passing car to take me to her.
Among these monuments I am too
small to find my way to the sandbanks
where she sometimes takes a man,
where sometimes I wander,
skipping stones, while she earns
in the backset of a car or under
a gun rack. It is hours like these
you learn the path of a ditch—quiet
only the huffers know. Day breaks:
the carnies have loaded up the rides,
heading out of town in a convoy,
leaving nothing behind, not even the grass.
JENNIFER ELISE FOERSTER (1979–), Mvskoke, is the author of two poetry collections, Leaving Tulsa and Bright Raft in the Afterweather. A graduate of the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, she received her PhD from the University of Denver, was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford, and has received grants and fellowships from the Lannan Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Relic
An atlas
on the underside of my dream.
My half-shut eyelid—
a black wing.
I dipped sharp quills
in the night’s mouth—
moths swarmed
from my throat.
I pulled a feather blanket
over my skeleton
and woke—
a map of America
flapping in the dark.
Once I dreamt
of inheriting this—
my mother
who still follows crows
through the field,
my sister’s small hand
tucked inside hers,
me on her breast
in a burial quilt.
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.
LARA MANN (1983–), Choctaw, is of English, Irish, Choctaw, French, German, Scottish, Spanish, Cherokee, Welsh, and Mohawk descent. A native of Kansas, her first chapbook, A Song of Ascents and Descents, was published in 2014 in the United Kingdom by Salt Publishing as part of Effigies II, a compilation edited by Allison Hedge Coke. Mann previously taught English and creative writing at Haskell Indian Nations University and works in special education.
