Rock Collection

By César Love

I seek escape, not in smoke
Not in drink
But in rocks I’ve gathered

None are boulders, few are pebbles
The perfect mass gorges my two hands

Hardness is my comfort, density my high.

The Black One brings me to outer space
The Purple, a utopian palace
The Orange, a feast devoured slowly
The Grey, a ferry to oblivion

My comedown is softness
Reality, a sinkhole in feathers

Below my pillow
I keep an opal


Always the Land

When the storms end, he is quiet to all but the deaf

Many hear the whispers of streams, the mumbles of rivers 
But below the threshold of a lapping pond
There are sounds as soft as a tadpole’s heartbeat

At volumes quieter than grass
The land delivers a wordless sermon
You are free to leave before the end, for the sermon has no end

Can you bear the spastic stillness?
If you can listen for ten minutes, you are free to ask a question.
If you can listen for an hour, you can ask for anything you need.

Ask what about your bees?
The trellis on your porch, broken by the eight-foot weeds
It’s painted and repaired, ready for the blossoms
To greet the sun and moon, ready for the blossoms
To welcome back the bees.
Listen to the honey spinning into gold

Ask what about the blackout?
Remember the fireflies you caught so long ago?
You hid them in a basement jar.
Realize you’re one of them.
Hands unlock the lid, hands let all of you free.
Listen to the land echoing your glow


Lake Chabot

Castro Valley, California

Blue water, mirror of day
Show us the breadth of the sky

Dark water, mirror of night
How lovely the moon on your throat

Sweet water, ripples and tides
Ladles of kisses
The brush of your tongue moistens our clay

Deep water, so certain the currents
Sleepless their movement
Sleepless your will

Still water, gentle the splashes
So peaceful your power
So quiet creation


The Sprinklers

Surprised on sunny park grass
The intrusion of sprinkler water
Hidden fountains meant for moonlight
Let loose by mistimed dials

An accidental shower
Perhaps you scamper from the grass
Safe and only a little wet
Perhaps they give you a hearty splash

Soaked or dry
Savor the wet sparklers
The cool of deepsome wells

This is not the Alhambra
This is not Niagara
Small rainbows

The rise and fall of water drops
An arc of musical notes
Spiring to the sky
In love enough
To fall to Earth.


© César Love. All rights reserved.


ABOUT THE AUTHOR: César Love writes poems about displacement and the search for home. He can be found at open mics of the San Francisco Bay Area. His new book of poems is titled Birthright
http://cesarlovepoetry.yolasite.com/

Once Upon A River

By Tiffany Midge

We were the kids trading marbles and penny candy at the Friday night Grange Hall meetings. We were the deaf shopkeeper at McDougals who said the comics would set ya back two bits, and the digests two bits and a George Washington. We were the Pillager kids from your dad’s class who had you over for supper, who horrified your mom when Mrs. Pillager wiped the rain off her hounds with a dishcloth, then covered the fried chicken with the same cloth.

We were the voices of the evening church bells chiming every sunset and the Rutherford sisters who graciously invited you into their doily-drenched parlor for hot water and honey and taught you how to play Hearts.

We were the hippie mom of the kid you played with, who stored the umbilical cords of her children in the back of the freezer, and the waitress at the Silver Spoon who dished you free bowls of vanilla ice cream on slow nights. We were the man who convinced you he was going to commandeer a raft all the way to Hawaii and who you swear you saw on the TV news, safe and triumphant after he’d mysteriously left town.

We were the junkyard dog next door whose owner was jaundiced and sported a hook for a hand, and the Davenquist boy who you traded your Girl Scout Mints for a litter of baby mice that all died because the house was too cold at night, so your dad replaced them with tropical fish.

We were the general store where you ran to fetch the mail every afternoon from Box 70 and spent your ten cent weekly allowance on a candy bar, and the girl named Rudy whose newborn sister had pierced ears and whose dad smoked from a hookah pipe, and Brian Osterday who was your perfect first love and who had a brother named Royal, the name of your orange cat.

We were the Snoqualmie Bull’s Saturday baseball games your dad coached and the fat catcher named Moose who later died from a broken leg. We were Brownie meetings in the basement of the library across the street.

We were the occasional shrieking of the firehouse alarm alerting your dad, in the volunteer squad to run up the block and help save distressed babies or car engine fires, and we were creek crawdads and guppies and the steady stream of bull fish hooked from the banks of the Snoqualmie River.

We were the long days that existed solely for the pleasures of swimming in the lagoons of that river, and the sandbar where some fishermen gave you your first can of beer and where you traced pictures in the sand and buried costume jewelry and brooches stolen from your mother’s dresser.

We were the sticker bushes alongside the banks where you harvested quarts of blackberries and traded to Mrs. Higgenbottom who made you a blue pie.

We were Mary Chesum whose parents were Yakima Indians and we were the Friday night when she was abducted from the house she was babysitting at, taken to the river where she was alternately chased, then stabbed, and chased again, repeatedly—her blood and clothing spilling across the lengths of the rocky bank—by a high school senior who she’d been refusing to date.

We were Mary Chesum’s younger sister Lisa, your friend, your classmate. You were the only two Indian girls in school, the only ones with that long black hair that wrapped around your shoulders like shawls. The only two girls who knew they were different, who knew they’d be singled out; girls who paired up for safety and refuge, for shelter; ones who knew how to flee to the banks of the river, instinctually, by memory.

We were there, that day on the playground when your shoelace had broken and Lisa without hesitation unbraided her lace and gave it to you.
We watched as she bent over and threaded the lace into the grommets of your shoe, then went for the remainder of the day with her one shoe loose and undressed.

Copyright © Tiffany Midge. All rights reserved.
Once Upon A River appeared in “Native Literatures: Generations," 2010.



Tiffany Midge’s book “Outlaws, Renegades and Saints, Diary of a Mixed-up Halfbreed” won the Diane Decorah Poetry Award. She’s most recently been published in North American Review, The Raven Chronicles, Florida Review and the online journal No Tell Motel. An enrolled Standing Rock Sioux and MFA grad from University of Idaho she lives in Moscow, Idaho (Nez Perce country) and teaches part time with Northwest Indian College. 
https://tiffanymidge.wixsite.com/website

I Learned All My Spanish in School

By E.K. Keith

I never tried to pass for White
but I have been passed
because it's good to be White in America
and Mother knows best
to give a not-quite-white baby
White names that don't explain
such dark eyes and such tight curls
My name never stopped mean girls hissing
gringa cola prieta and guera and taco
brown on the inside
and not-quite-white on the outside

You would not believe how White people talk
about Other people when they think you're White
How it's more polite to say Spanish
instead of Mexican
and the subtle shift in tone
when your Mexican is discovered
your tortillas uncovered
I never tried to pass for White
but I have been passed
because White people who like me
want to give me the benefit of the doubt
and let me tell you, sister
There's nothing like White Privilege
and my mother knew it
So when people would ask
"Are you Italian or Greek?"
she would laugh and say
"Good guess!"
It is so disappointing
such dark eyes and such tight curls
fail to fit in
not White, not Mexican

I have been passed
I identify as White Trash
My mother is Mexican
but her family doesn't mind
porque no hay indios in la familia
And since I learned all my Spanish in school
it was years before I understood
It's good to be White in America


Mythic Arcade

When I was a kid in Texas
California was nothing but a dream
Not much more than a metaphor
A fantasy of golden glitz and the big screen

I bet you know a lot about Texas
I bet I know what you’ve seen
Alamo heroes, political zeroes
Ten-gallon hats and oil patch schemes

You can find surfers in Texas
Riding in the oil tanker’s wake
You can find California cowboys
They’re speeding up and down the interstate

You can’t see Texas from the inside
You can’t see the mythic arcade
Just people, running for the money
Inside California it’s the same

If you need roots, go to Texas.
If you don’t belong where you are
You might find the right place is California
Who you want to be is who you are

Siblings

Brown sparrows
sift trash from a dump
find treasure
in mounds of rotting food
plastic wrappers aluminum
cans rusting toasters
shitty diapers hairdryers
headless dolls sideways
refrigerators without doors

One brown sparrow
beats its wings in the dirt
kicks
and tangles tighter
in a six-pack plastic noose


© E.K. Keith. All rights reserved. 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: E.K. Keith shouts her poems on the street corner, and she’s just as likely to take the mic at a bar, coffee shop, or radio station. She has made San Francisco her home, although growing up in urban Texas still influences her worldview. Like most Americans, there is nothing pure about E.K.’s blood. As a result of love that mooningly ignored good sense and social boundaries across several generations, E.K. has never fit neatly into any racial, cultural, or ethnic categories. Her work appears online and in print on all three coasts and places in between, and among them are Sweet Wolverine, Haight Ashbury Literary Journal, and Nerve Cowboy. E.K. organizes Poems Under the Dome, San Francisco's annual open mic celebration of Poetry Month inside City Hall. She is a public high school teacher librarian which regularly presents opportunities for her to make the world a better place.

Fresh Wildness

By Rebecca Hatcher Travis

imbedded in every native heart
is love of land
this earth we stand on
live on
our homeland
among first memories

a part of us
like our own bodies
we know the connection
sweet *petrichor brings flashes
of childhood pleasures
we will always treasure

tender as flesh
her whipping winds
thunder rumbling
dust and rains
trembling darkness
heart-melting blueness above

our Mother
draws us outdoors
to fresh wildness
where we belong
in our special place on
this wondrous earth

*petrichor:  smell of rain

Copyright © 2016, Rebecca Hatcher Travis. All rights reserved.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Rebecca Hatcher Travis, an enrolled citizen of the Chickasaw Nation, often writes of her indigenous heritage and the beauty of the natural world. Her poetry book manuscript, Picked Apart the Bones, won the First Book Award from the Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas and was published by the Chickasaw Press. Her work has appeared in numerous anthologies, literary journals and online. Ms. Travis is a member of Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers and lives in south central Oklahoma, near the land her ancestors settled in Indian Territory days. She is currently working on another book of poetry and continues to give poetry presentations at Oklahoma venues.

OFI’ TOHBI’ IHINA’

By Jenny L. Davis

I didn’t carry my ancestors’ bones with me
to this Midwestern place.
I could not hear their voices.

I asked Rabbit to carry a note to them
but he baked it into cookies
and ate them with rosehip tea.

I asked Woodpecker to pound a song for them in cedar,
but the songs
could not cross the Mississippi.

I scratched a song in four lines for our ancestors
I wove a lullaby of yarn for our descendants, and
I stomped for all of us moving counter-clockwise in between.

Finally in the still of night
Cicada buzzed answers
in a tree beside my ear

“We left our bones
because we do not need them
to dance along the white dog's way.
           
You do not need them
to dance along
beneath us.”
  

Tethered

To the youth of Attawapiskat and our Native & Two-Spirit youth everywhere,
hold tight to the things that tether you.

Half a lifetime ago
I sat on the edge of a bed
holding cold gun metal until it turned warm
I sat there for hours.
Days.
Years.
I am sitting there still.

I could not move past the beings that tether me here.
You
are the beings that tether me here,
caught in a patch of briar so thick
I can’t break away without tearing a hole.
You are the beings that tether me here
And I hate you for it.

I can’t move past the beings that tether me here.
You
Are the beings that tether me here.
A sapling in the forest
Sharing water and gossip across our rooted toes.
You are the beings that tether me here
And I love you for it.


The girl who loves turtles
  
Summer is her favorite season
with its heavy shawl of water in the air
and sun that can scorch the skin in minutes.
But most of all
She loves summer for the turtles
answering the call to
come out from under shell arbors,
from behind winter aprons
and spring cotton ruffles.
Loksi’! Loski’! Loksi’!
Such strength in the way their legs move,
hips and shells rolling with each step
to rhythms old as the ground itself.
No sharp edges, just
the curves of muscle and bone and
light bouncing across browns, reds, and yellows
in the heat of summer when
turtles are called to each other to dance.
  

Let Us Rest
  
My people
were no strangers to disasters—
the fires, tornados, floods, and droughts
that scorch, bury, and reshape the earth
where they laid our ancestors to rest.

So dig up the bundles.
Test samples from bones,
cloth, and clay—
for the good of science,
toward that next publication,
or a new grant.

But don’t pretend that
it’s what my ancestors would have wanted.
We interred our loved ones
under our homes or within the great
mounded houses of earth
knowing, when the time came,
they’d be returned
to the water, mud,
and to the stars.

© Jenny L. Davis. All rights reserved.


ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Jenny L. Davis is a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation and originally from Oklahoma. She is an assistant professor at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign where she lives with her partner and spends most of her time tending her cats (and cat-sized Chihuahua), plants, and the students in her American Indian Studies and Anthropology classes. Both her research and activism center contemporary indigenous identity, indigenous language revitalization, and the Two-Spirit community.
WWW.AIS.ILLINOIS.EDU/PEOPLE/LOKSI




She is the author of Talking Indian: Identity and Language Revitalization in the Chickasaw Renaissance. 


Nomenclature, Miigaadiwin, a Forked Tongue

By Aja Couchois Duncan

Adze:

I should begin with adik, with hearding mammals ranging across the boreal expanse. To know the geography of it, to start with its features.

Your face is this blur of fur and antler.

My story is the history of frontier, a wooded terrain. We could not see each other through the cacophony of trees. But I could hear you breathing. Some kind of wind the nose sings. Adze is stripping the layers of. When the skin is torn from muscle, cleaved from bone. 

Agawaatese is not sound but shadow. An interception of light.



Edawayi’ii:


There are many ways to tell both sides of it. It is a preposition.

The French mated their way through the colonies. The English claimed only their mirror image. Later the science of alterity would explain such predilections. Absent of Freud, native kinship systems did not distinguish between the progeny of. 

Halfbreeds have their own word for gichi-mookomaan, for white person, for butcher knife. Little bear girl took the knife and split herself down the middle. Little bear girl sits beside me on the rooftop, her hair scissoring the wind. Together we watch flora and fauna duck for cover. One is the hydrology of earthquakes, the other less tectonic, more personal. Gichi-mookomaan is nowhere to be found.

It is difficult to be part of a species. There is so little to distinguish yourself from. Sapiens traveled slowly across continents, moved from trees to terra firma. At which point did gichi-mookomaan roam?

They have paved the surface of our habitat, but someday they too will long for the upper canopy. Bipedalism is a fetish of the imperial view.


Optics:  


The science of sight ignores the spirit of mescaline, of cactus, of natives of the new world.

After the earth split, there were two, 
old  and new. The old world was heavy with      everything  
that began it. The new world was fecund, 
virile.

When the first people came out of the trees they found themselves on a wooded island already crowded with bear and wolf. Stripping bark from the trees, they built canoes and paddled to the other side.

When light moves through solid particles it loses pieces of itself. It is altered once it reaches its destination.

Omoodayaabik is shattered, a piece of broken glass. Before it could have been anything, a lantern, window, a bottle of whiskey. The science of sight does not trouble itself with such inquiries. There are only the intricacies of the eye, its mechanics of doing. The eye does not know which side of the earth it is on. The eye cannot see the birthing folds, the suckled nipples beneath the limbs of trees. The nose is far less complicated. There is no discipline dedicated solely to its mysteries. But it is the nose that remembers our disastrous origins. We are sentient. We are this scent of things.

© Aja Couchois Duncan. All rights reserved.

Nomenclature, Miigaadiwin, a Forked Tongue, is included in Restless Continent, published by Litmus Press. An earlier version was published as a chapbook by CC Marimbo Press.  


ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Aja Couchois Duncan is a Bay Area educator, writer and coach of Ojibwe, French and Scottish descent. Her writing has been anthologized in Biting the Error: Writers Explore Narrative (Coach House Press,) Bay Poetics (Faux Press) and Love Shook My Heart 2 (Alyson Press). Her most recent chapbook, Nomenclature, Miigaadiwin, a Forked Tongue was published by CC Marimbo press. A fictional writer of non-fiction, she has published essays in the North American Review and Chain. In 2005, she was a recipient of the Marin Arts Council Award Grant for Literary Arts, and, in 2013, she received a James D. Phelan Literary Award. Her first book, Restless Continent, is forthcoming in the spring of 2016 from Litmus Press. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University and a variety of other degrees and credentials to certify her as human. Great Spirit knew it all along. ajacouchoisduncan.blogspot.com

River, Blood, And Corn: A Community of Voices

Promoting community and strengthening cultures with storytelling, poetry and prose.

  • Copyright © 2010-2024. Individual writers and photographers retain all rights to their work, unless they have other agreements with previous publishers.
  • We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.

  • If stories come to you, care for them. And learn to give them away where they are needed. Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive.—Barry Lopez, in Crow and Weasel