Weeping Women

By Rain Prud'homme-Cranford

When we weep

Mothers cry with us.

When we weep

Grandmothers pat their eyes.



Bits of blood and spit,

Dried salt and amniotic fluid

Make tears falling briefly,

Before we push them away--

As all weeping women before us.

Gathering strength from toes

Rooted in soil memories

And arms strong with

Carrying baskets

Of babies.

Carrying baskets

Of culture.



Weeping women cling

To the edge of dream

Crying for their lost children,

Crying for their husbands.

With sobs too deep and full

Of histories of biting back moans

That their tears fall as silent as death.



Against the rough periphery of memory

The whimper of ladies’ lamentations

Carve tributaries of grief inherent

In blood, from the fishing towns of

The Mississippi river to the

Buffalo plains of Saskatchewan.

Separated by geography.

United by blood.

They sing songs of sorrow

Into our unconscious actions---

Laced with brittle

Hope,

Survival,

Unstoppable Grace.


Copyright © Rain Prud'homme-Cranford. All rights reserved.


ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Rain Prud'homme-Cranford is a poet, academic, musician and spoken word artist. Currently she is a Sutton Fellowship Doctoral student in English at the University of Oklahoma. She is the author of Smoked Mullet Cornbread Crawdad Memory, winner of the Native Writers' Circle of the Americas First Book Award, Poetry. Her work has appeared in various journals including Ahani: Indigenous American Poetry and American Indian Culture and Research Journal. Rain’s critical work focuses on (re)inserting Mvskogean and Creole Indigeneity into Southern Literary experience. 

Hunted

By Kim Shuck

This morning is an ambush predator
Begins late with
Sirens and alarms that spin over the
Hills there is damp the
City raccoons bumble deceptively and
Dangerously on the
Porch kitten and I both with
Lifted hackles take some comfort in hot oats
Strawberries and sweetgrass
Smoke tufted slippers the rising
Hum of central heating kitten
Captures a brace of packing peanuts and
Gradually we subdue this hour together the dark
Lifts streetlights will blink their firefly impulse
Draining even now even
Now the armament of experienced
Early browsers makes smooth this edged thing this
Day curled against the core of vicious
Financial institution highwaymen and fear led
Pathologies of greed


Copyright © Kim Shuck. All rights reserved.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: 
Kim Shuck is a writer, visual artist, curator, frustrated mom and recovering sarcastic. She holds an MFA in Fine Arts from San Francisco State University. Her first solo book of poetry, Smuggling Cherokee, was published by Greenfield Review press in 2005 and won the Diane Decorah Award from the Native Writers Circle of the Americas. Recent work has been included in the anthologies New Poets of the American West and I Was Indian. In June 2010 Kim had a month long co-residency at the de Young Museum in San Francisco. Visit her on the web at www.kimshuck.com

Altar of Unknown

By Lisa Marie Rollins

I have two rituals before I unpack the first box to set up in a new house. I start at my front door, light a stick of sage, walk around from front to back door, to front again. I walk each room, speak aloud to my new home, speak words to what kind of life I want to live in my new space. I walk every corner, closet, doorway, bathroom until my space is filled with the sweet smell of cleansing sage. After the sage, I choose where I will build my house altar. My altar hosts photo images of my ancestors, glass jars or bottles filled with water from beaches and rivers I have visited, and colored stones from walks in the mountains. There is a gourd I found, scrubbed, oiled and wrapped about its neck a white and copper rosary a friends mother gave me back in 1994. There is a ceramic and steel crucifix I bought in Mexico when I was 26 and a photo representation of Ile Orisha Oya surrounded by copper and rust colored fabric. 

The ancestors on my altar change. This year as I re-center my home, clean and dress my altar, I add photos of more of the dead. As I add these photos, I think about who could appear on it soon, and about those whom I have never met.

I have never been an adopted person who obsesses about my family of origin as a child or adolescent. While in many ways, I was isolated from my family and the community that I grew up in, I dreamt more about running away to far away ancient lands, and other countries. I lost myself in the myriad of books I constantly read, or conjured up my own fantastic stories of science fiction or earth or moon magic to project me away from the circumstances I was in. I didn’t spend hours upon hours wondering who my birth mother and father were or what they were doing.

I’m not sure when I started making connections to the absences of what I held as ideas of mother, father, brother, sister, grandmother or grandfather in my family of origin, to absences that live in my heart, shadow my spirit. The experience of something ‘nagging’ or missing is common for me and for so many of us who have been disconnected from our families of origin that it seems natural to everyday life. I live with empty spaces where bodies should be in photos. I travel with ghosts of the unknown. I walk with blanks on the story of my conception and birth. I reconcile what only lives in my imagination, the stories I collect from someone who has memory, and the stories I construct from timelines I make, from other’s memories, stories to tell myself.

Like many adoptees, there came a day when I sent away for copies of my adoption paperwork. I remember the day the first round of documents from the Washington state department of social services came in the mail. It was the common, brown manila envelope, thick with paper, heavy with implications. I found it tucked inside my mailbox, I took it inside, placed it in the middle of the kitchen table and went to turn on the teapot.

While the water started to steam, I opened the envelope, and examined the sheets, about 40 pages of information I had never read before. Alongside discoveries I found pages and paragraphs that reveled more secrets, hiding specific words, names and full sentences blocked out with a big black marker. Things I am never allowed to know. Information and memory that is lost forever.

How do I construct my altar when my ancestors are hidden from me? What blanks will remain when my birth father, who is alive now, but could become an ancestor very soon, passes on? What stories will they tell me once he is gone, about how I have his hands, or his chin and what photo will they give me, if any, to place alongside the other photos of ghosts that I know?

My altar has become a reminder of reconciliation of spirit, and an acceptance of the unknown. Each time I cleanse it with sage, or dust it off, or clean it fully, redressing it with fresh flowers, new colors or add new or old images of found / lost ancestors, it represents more than who has come before me. Its construction reconciles the absences, faces them as living fears, and acknowledges them as unknowns. It is a living structural way to heal, way to grow and be whole and fill the empty spaces. 

On my altar lives photos of my ancestors. Photos of those who are gone in my family like my grandfather Macan on my mother side, my cousin Mandy who died in a car accident, and of my birth grandfather Arino, whom I never knew, but whose wrinkled forehead I see in the mirror. A blank card holds space for ancestors whom I will never know from my families of origin. There are images I have claimed of my chosen family, a group that includes mentors, scholars and people who made impacts on my life and whose voices I still hear in my head when I write, make decisions, or meditate and pray.

This new year, I cleanse my altar again, dusting each trinket, resetting them into place, I am full of fear my birth father’s family will continue to keep my body a secret from him. I fear I will remain a ghost in their photos and he will die before I know him. I fear there will be another addition to my ancestors, another addition to history of unknowns I must reconcile. I pray and burn sage, ask for courage to face fear and to dive into these blanks, into the absences that live in photos with and without me in them, these unknowns that ground me as much as they unsettle me.

The prayer I give today is a prayer for you, too. Here’s to all of your and my absences being filled with light, and to the acceptance of the unknown inside the shadows, my friends.

Copyright © Lisa Marie Rollins. All rights reserved.


ABOUT THE AUTHOR: 
Lisa Marie Rollins is a Black/Filipina writer, playwright and performer and a leading voice in transracial/ international adoption education and advocacy. She is one of Colorlines magazine’s “Innovators to Watch” for her work around reproductive justice / global adoption and race. She is a VONA alumni in Poetry and recipient of the James Irvine and Zellerbach Foundations Individual Artist funding for her acclaimed solo play, “Ungrateful Daughter: One Black Girls story of being adopted into a white family… that aren’t celebrities”. Her most recent publications can be found in the anthology “Other Tongues: Mixed-Race Women Speak Out” and her new short chapbook, “Splice”.

You can see more of her work and contact her at birthproject.wordpress.com

Cedar Songs, Left Behind

By Linda Boyden


She stayed behind, the mother of my grandfathers,
not by choice, his or hers: theirs.
Singled out, she was, by soldiers
spared, they told her, by yaller hair, blue eyes
spoilt tho' she was, still no kind of fate
for a white woman, this trail
this Removal.
In the guile of their final night,
in the lull of the dark, they slept,
the mother of my grandfathers and her man,
her red earth man
his skin in rich opposition to her pale,
they lay entwined until he woke.
Stirred by the cadence of boot-heel crunch on gravel,
thethick man-scent rising in the air,
whiskeysmokesweatwool
he woke.
My grandfather’s father
crossed to the rough-hewn mantle for his flute,
the smoothed cedar flute,
which under my living fingers
delivers still the songs;
the haunting cedar songs,
gifts left behind by the Tree People
in the branch
he carved so long ago.
The mother of my grandfathers taught her son,
then her grandson, the songs he played that night.
In time, he taught his granddaughter,
child of pale hair and red earth skin.
Told her, too, the story:
Played me awake that night, she said,
with my fingers one by one on his;
played into them the cedar songs, one by one,
until the soldiers came.
As they broke down the door, as they dragged him away,
I faltered once, she said, but did not stop.
I released the cedar songs instead of tears
as they pushed my man from the dawn, from my arms
I played for him the songs,
for the son born after, for the grandson of my old age….
Now as grandmother I tell her words.
I, the girl blessed with Grandmother’s name and hair,
Grandfather’s red earth skin,
I play the sweet cedar songs,
the haunting holy gifts of the trees
he left behind.

First published in The People Who Stayed, Southeastern Indian Writing After Removal 2010, The University of Oklahoma. Also in a self published chapbook, “Cemetery Plots” 2006. Winner 2006 5th Annual Pleasanton Poetry Festival, Adult Poetry.
Copyright © Linda Boyden. All Rights Reserved.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Of mixed-blood Cherokee/Irish and French Canadian ancestries, Linda Boyden has spent most of her adult life leading children to literacy. From 1970-1997, she taught in primary grades, receiving her master’s in Gifted and Talented Education in 1992 from the University of Virginia, Charlottesville. In 1997, Linda decided to change careers and abandoned full-time teaching for full-time writing. Her first picture book, “The Blue Roses”, debuted in 2002. It was the recipient of Lee and Low Books’ first New Voices Award, the 2003 Paterson Prize, Wordcraft Circle of Native American Writers and Storytellers’ Book of the Year, Children’s Literature, 2002-2003, and was included on the prestigious CCBC (Cooperative Children’s Book Center) 2003 Choices list of recommended titles. In 2007 she wrote and illustrated her second picture book, “Powwow’s Coming” published by the University of New Mexico Press. She has also written and illustrated “Giveaways, an ABC of Loanwords from the Americas” published also by the University of New Mexico Press in 2010. In 2011, Giveaways was the recipient of three Finalist Awards from the International Book Awards.
Linda is a member of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators and Wordcraft Circle of Native American Writers and Storytellers. She enjoys doing author visits and storytelling at schools and libraries as well as presenting workshops at writing conferences around the country. Visit her on the web at www.lindaboyden.com

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