Showing posts with label Kim Shuck. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Kim Shuck. Show all posts

Pick a Garnet to Sleep In

by Kim Shuck

We are hunting the graveyards and 
Practicing fly-casting off of the roof at 4am 
It must be summer 
I paint the symbols on my feet 
Study the evolution of bats and 
21st century poetry of the 600 block of Chenery 
Oh child 
I braid you into my hair most days 
And I’m the only one who can read you there 
But then 
We are descended from the symbolic dead and 
I’m becoming the old woman out of those stories 
If not as quickly as I’d hoped 

Copyright © 2024 Kim Shuck. All rights reserved.
 
Kim Shuck loves fiddling with words and puzzles and stones. Shuck served as the 7th Poet Laureate of San Francisco and is still recovering. Her latest book is Pick a Garnet to Sleep In.



Unpapered: Writers Consider Native American Identity and Cultural Belonging


Edited by Diane Glancy and Linda Rodriguez 


Unpapered is a collection of personal narratives by Indigenous writers exploring the meaning and limits of Native American identity beyond its legal margins. Native heritage is neither simple nor always clearly documented, and citizenship is a legal and political matter of sovereign nations determined by such criteria as blood quantum, tribal rolls, or community involvement. Those who claim a Native cultural identity often have family stories of tenuous ties dating back several generations. Given that tribal enrollment was part of a string of government programs and agreements calculated to quantify and dismiss Native populations, many writers who identify culturally and are recognized as Native Americans do not hold tribal citizenship. 
 
Unpapered charts how current exclusionary tactics began as a response to “pretendians”—non-indigenous people assuming a Native identity for job benefits—and have expanded to an intense patrolling of identity that divides Native communities and has resulted in attacks on peoples’ professional, spiritual, emotional, and physical states. An essential addition to Native discourse, Unpapered shows how social and political ideologies have created barriers for Native people truthfully claiming identities while simultaneously upholding stereotypes.

For Q

by Kim Shuck 
 
Pull on a different mountain range 
One leg at a time 
You time travel in poem 
He told me 
I've seen you do it 
We went relic spotting 
More than once 
Through the line up of the '53 Dodgers 
Before his heart was broken 
Before his heart was broken 
Memories never sit as neatly in a prong setting 
As a heart solitaire 
Memories never sit as neatly 
 
Kim Shuck is the 7th Poet Laureate of San Francisco Emerita. Shuck is solo author of 9 books, co-authored one, edited another ten and has contributed to a vast array of anthologies, journals, curriculum guides, tours, and protests. www.kimshuck.com

Community

by Kim Shuck 
 
Grandma lived with this peppernut 
Sapling and tree 
They drank the same water 
I know that the creek is here 
Under ground 
Under thought 
Near the lilac 
Someone’s relic of a different life 
Someone’s idea 
Carried from somewhere else 
On a quiet day 
When there has been rain 
Rest your cheek on the trunk and hear/feel 
Water 
Running in cracked pipes 
Grandma 
The tree 
The elderberry 
The salamander 
The sense of humor 
The fog 
Each water particle 
Rhymes with the life here 
Whispers kinship 
To the cracked and layered 
Rocks on this 
Hill 
 
Copyright © Kim Shuck. All rights reserved. 
 
Kim Shuck is the 7th Poet Laureate of San Francisco Emerita. Shuck is solo author of eight books and one that is on the way. She has edited or co-edited ten volumes of poetry. She contributed essays to the recently released de Young 125, a collection of writing about and photographs of pieces in the permanent collections of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Her most recent collection of poems is Exile Heart from That Painted Horse Press. www.kimshuck.com

Home Rocks

by Kim Shuck

This morning I hear the singing 
One mountain to another 
Across valley and piped creek 
Rock 
Tumbling in culvert 
Translating water into 
Serpentine thoughts 
When they moved the star map 
I could hear her singing 
Can hear her singing now 
Can hear her learning 
Granite story 
Heat and cooling 
We are all stories in series 
The water we are 
The water that has carried us 
Has carried stone 
Has cracked a surface has 
Sung through the culverts 
Another kind of mapping of 
Writing 
A travel story a 
Song of staying and of 
Shifting 
A song called across this valley from this mountain to another 
A scatter 
A collection 
I found a scrap of you 
Wrenched from your hill 
Mounted on a museum wall 
We sang quiet songs to one other 
All afternoon 
Dissident rocks that we are 
Just today I could hear our home hills 
The waters that polished us 
Humming an answer

Copyright Kim Shuck. All rights reserved.

Kim Shuck, a native of San Francisco whose work explores her multiethnic roots, is San Francisco’s seventh poet laureate. 

A lifelong resident of San Francisco, Shuck lives in the Castro district. Her poetry collections include Clouds Running InRabbit Stories, Smuggling Cherokee and Deer Trails. Shuck also teaches at the California College of Art, in the diversity department, and has taught at San Francisco State University. She has volunteered in San Francisco Unified School District classrooms for two decades. www.kimshuck.com

Yellow Medicine Review

"Women's Wisdom, Women's Strength" Issue. Guest edited by CMarie Fuhrman. 
Cover art: MAESTRAPEACE, detail of the Healing Panel, mural on The San Francisco Women's Building, 18th and Valencia Streets, by Juana Alicia, Miranda Bergman, Edythe Boone, Susan Cervantes, Meera Desai, Yvonne Littleton and Irene Perez. 
 
Contributors include Julian Ankney, Tacey M. Atsitty, Dawn Pichon Barron, Esther G. Belin, Kimberly Blaeser, Linda Boyden, Dr. Deidra Suwanee Dees, Marisa Duarte, Zoe Antoinette Eddy, Sarah Christine Hennessey, Lance Henson, Ines Hernandez-Avila, Boderra Joe, Bryan Kamaoli Kuwada, Manny Loley, Amber McCrary, Ruby Hansen Murray, Elise Paschen, Beth Piatote, Ursula Pike, Vivian Faith Prescott, Suzanne Rancourt, Marcie Rendon, C.R. Resetarits, Barbara Robidoux, Kim Shuck, Beverly Singer, Angel Sobotta, w.C.Sy / waaseyaa'sin Christine Sy, Jonathan Taylor, Tavia Torralba, Terra Trevor, J.K. Tsosie, Angie Trudell Vasquez, Steven Warren, Kyle White, Kimberly Gail Wieser, and Ray Young Bear.

Yellow Medicine Review A Journal of Indigenous Literature, Art, and Thought 

Arts of Patience

by Kim Shuck 

We’ve been collecting stairs for years 
Stairs and the notion of stairs 
Build with them like children do 
Just like playing with blocks we will 
Paint them with heart ideas with generational hope 
May yet reach the somewhere else we had in mind 
We wanted so little in those days 
Between the bingo and 
Collecting funerals 
Houses subside and the 
Screen door doesn’t fit quite the 
Hedge apples grow 
Thorn and poison in the way that they have 
We collect these things 
Comb the rivers and 
Creeks the margins of change for things like 
Glass bottles to exchange for bait 
Catch other things that we want too and all of my heroes 
Were good at fileting fish 
And we were in the living room 
Gathering stairs in boxes and 
Pressed flat in books and 
Trying not to hide them 
Trying not to feel guilty

© Kim Shuck. All rights reserved. 

Kim Shuck a native of San Francisco whose work explores her multiethnic roots, is San Francisco’s seventh poet laureate. 

A lifelong resident of San Francisco, Shuck lives in the Castro district. Her poetry collections include Clouds Running In, Rabbit Stories, Smuggling Cherokee and Deer Trails. Shuck also teaches at the California College of Art, in the diversity department, and has taught at San Francisco State University. She has volunteered in San Francisco Unified School District classrooms for two decades. www.kimshuck.com

Deer Trails by Kim Shuck


Deer Trails is a strongly elegiac evocation of a San Francisco that lies buried under its contemporary urban landscape, but can still be found peeking through. Native American and native San Franciscan Kim Shuck is the city's seventh poet laureate, and in these poems she celebrates the enduring presence of indigenous San Francisco as a form of resistance to gentrification, urbanization, and the erasure of memory. www.kimshuck.com

Deer Trails San Francisco Poet Laureate Series No. 7 Kim Shuck 

Urban Fauna

by Kim Shuck 

You know how the deer on Market Street are 
With their stoplight eyes 
Picking their way down old runoff paths 
Past the disappearing relocated indigenous women 
The ravens are here to sing us visible 
Drumming on their collection of upended pots and Industrial buckets 
Don't you tell me how we've changed 
We were right there Near the department store 
Near the burial sites Singing to the ancestors 
This isn't an abstract gesture 
It's not a schoolroom exercise 
There are predators here 
And the maps of safe passage change every day 
And the wind comes up in the afternoon 
Don't you tell me how we've changed 
The roots of this hill have learned what to call us 
Just about 
Our clothes collected for the festival 
Our family members taken to who knows 
You might just sit down and listen for a change 
I'm not part of your curriculum 
We're a whole other thing 
Light reflecting off of the miles of glass 
How many feet deep was it? 
Can you hear the water like shattered windows 
Piled just like them 
Just there where the tall buildings lean like stealing 

© Kim Shuck. All rights reserved.




Kim Shuck is a complicated equation with an irrational answer. Shuck is the current and 7th poet laureate of San Francisco and will have a new book out from City Lights Press in the Fall. www.kimshuck.com

Little of the Vibration Will Return

by Kim Shuck
At 526 years the fetus is developing thalamic connections 
Vulnerable
Neutrons fluoresce
Limbic system a web spinning into
Memory
Emotion
Transgender home for our research
Water flower shifts
Cream
Lavender
One day and the next
They embrace the diversity of experience of
Experiment
Branches snapped
With science-based fingertips
A focus
A y-shaped brain connection
This human body is evidence-based
Here in the furniture fort of our entitlement
Chemistry bathing in new attachments
We sing the forbidden words into the
Upholstery
Little of the vibration will return
Your self
An idea banned before the seed swells
Before the shell cracks


© Kim Shuck. All rights reserved.


Kim Shuck's life has now lost all semblance of control. In June she was named the 7th poet laureate of San Francisco and she can now be found reading pretty much all the time, everywhere in the greater SF Bay Area. She is having a fantastic time and is grateful for the honor. Her most recent book is Clouds Running In

www.kimshuck.com


Trouble Song

by Kim Shuck

Take hold of your stubborn
Twine fingers in your defiant
Dig in
Breathe deep into your
Creative 
Make space for your heartbreak but let it start healing
We were walked from the east
We were packed into ships
We were sold by our families
We were illegal
We were hunted
We are here
We are always
We are
Aways
Sing that restless patience
Our inheritance
Take hold of hands
Take hold of your stubborn
Take hold
Take care
Take caring
Self brightly
Group with care
Hold tight and sing

© Kim Shuck. All rights reserved. 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Kim Shuck is feeling very scattered these days among the Executive Orders and banishments. She teaches 2nd graders most Thursdays, 4th graders some Wednesdays and college undergrads on Fridays. At other times she tries to reweave the fraying webs of communities that she loves. As for poetic qualifications… magazines, anthologies, solo books awards… degrees… years of working in the poetry mine. In 2017 Shuck was appointed to serve as San Francisco's next Poet Laureate. www.kimshuck.com


Riot Call

By Kim Shuck

Ravens have been loud for a few days
Riot call and mutter
Look out through every coin and
Obsidian mirror every
Scrap of light
Every bead every
Combination lock
Bis morgan fruh
Raven's eyes in
Dew on the jasmine blossoms I
Noticed on Sunday they're blooming again
Fly high
Fly far we're
Planting rhubarb in the garden this season if this
Hot overcast breaks if the
Leaves survive I've
Put your chair out again the
Unfinished puzzle on the
Basement table staring back
Raven's eyes it's ok I'll
Finish it there are books and
Tea there is
History I will hold it here in my
Left hand I will hold it there is
Smoked tea and I will find some
Blackberries your shoes are there in the
Bag on my rocking chair if you like we can
Walk on Sunday


© Kim Shuck. All rights reserved. 















ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Kim Shuck is a wide-eyed iconoclast and baker of cookies. She
holds a fine arts MFA from San Francisco State, raised three humans, one bird and an array of furred, feathered and finned beings, and has official documentation declaring her everything from a hero to a nightmare. She wanders her home town on foot most days, organizes a regular poetry series at Modern Times Bookstore, and teaches studio art and Native short form lit. She is a lousy housekeeper. Kim has three books currently in print, the latest is Clouds Running In from Taurean Horn Press. www.kimshuck.com




River, Blood, And Corn: A Community of Voices

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