River, Blood, And Corn Literary Journal

River, Blood, And Corn: A Community of Voices

At River, Blood, And Corn, we are promoting community and strengthening cultures with storytelling, poetry and prose. Established in 2010 by Native writers, our starting point, and our goal, is to honor and continue the work of Lee Francis III, and Geary Hobson, founders of Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers, working to ensure the voices of Native writers and storytellers past, present and future, are heard throughout the world. A variety of writers, backgrounds, communities and viewpoints are presented here. Included in our themes are the Elders whose lives informed, instructed, shaped and changed ours.

While our primary focus is Indigenous writers, we have woven writers and artists from a variety of ethnicities and communities into our pages. Perhaps people of many ethnicities, including recent immigrants from throughout the Americas as well as other parts of the world will find something in this collection that will speak to them with respect to issues of race, identity, culture, community, and representation.

Thank you to our readers. We are honored and grateful to each one of you.

THIRTY-ONE AMERICANS

by Dawn Downey

An ambulance shriek closes in. From which direction? Where? Where? I slam on the brakes midway through a left turn, and the ambulance screams past, dangerously close to my front bumper. After traffic nudges back to life, I’m frozen for a second, trying to remember how to drive.

I’ve just come from the art museum. I’d gone solo, so the visual images could sink into my cells, unobstructed by conversation. 30 Americans—an exhibit of American life, as interpreted by thirty contemporary black artists. It was a bad idea. Not the exhibit. My going to see the exhibit.

An engine revs; an SUV speeds by. Now I remember how to drive: Look both ways. Turn the steering wheel. Press the gas pedal. I cruise through the leafy neighborhood that surrounds the museum’s manicured gardens. Several blocks ahead, the ambulance is shrinking, its siren receding. #

I felt out of place among the white onlookers touring 30 Americans, even though I was an onlooker, too, gawking at my own life. Four hundred years of color-infused emotions—mine, the artists’, our ancestors’—compressed into claustrophobic passageways and alcoves. I chuckled at a montage of our hair in its myriad configurations. Yup, I used to sport that stick-straight coif, thanks to a lye relaxer that—swear to god—I could still smell. And I fairly levitated with joy at a human-shaped sculpture made of flower blossoms. You couldn’t identify gender, race, or age. Yes, let me see cabbage roses when I look at my enemies. Let the fragrance of gardenias hang in the air between us. Apparently, I have a greater capacity for despondence than optimism. Despite the intermittent uplift, four hundred years beat me down. #

I pull up for a red light at a crossroad where high-end white Kansas City smacks up against low-end black Kansas City. Fast food. Bus stop. Cell phone mart. An urban apparel store sits across the street from a health clinic. Anchoring the corner is Walgreens, the place I stock up on eye shadow in shades designed for women of color. #

The exhibition flowed into a corner housing an installation called “Duck, Duck, Noose.” A circle of nine wooden stools. On each stool sat a KKK hood, empty eyeholes facing the center, where a rope dangled from the ceiling, the end pooled in tidy coils on the floor. I gasped. Run. Get the hell out of here. Stop looking. But “Duck, Duck, Noose” forced me to stare, like an assailant holding my head underwater. I stumbled past in a stupor. #

The car in front of me sits a beat too long after the light turns green. Cell phone distraction? The driver creeps into the intersection. Stops again. What is he—?

In the fast food parking lot, the ambulance.

Two white policemen.

A black person flat on the ground. Face-up.

Bright flowered fabric across thighs. Skirt. A woman.

Still as a rock.

I clench the steering wheel. Hyperventilate. My vision blurs, and I realize I’m sobbing. Need to pull over, to park, to say oh my god, oh my god, but I can’t remember how to stop driving. Automatic pilot glides the car past the scene, but my heart stumbles past it in a stupor.

On the highway, as grief makes a slick mess of my face, a slide show plays the images my brain has photographed. She’s on her back, arms and legs spread. Her head is inches from the policemen’s polished shoes. Her legs span the sidewalk. The patrolmen stand beside their car, hands resting on their heavy-laden belts. They appear to watch traffic go by. If she were alive, they’d be kneeling at her side, wouldn’t they? They’d be making her comfortable, wouldn’t they? The EMTs would be rushing to her aid, wouldn’t they? There is an absence of urgency.

She’s alone. May she find peace. Her family’s going to get a bad phone call. May they find peace.

I grip the steering wheel hard, to squeeze life back into its proper shape. So I can buy makeup again at Walgreens. Maybe she’s part of an art installation. I want her to be an art installation.

She’s lying in savasana—corpse pose. She’s anonymous. I name her Grace. Who lies at the intersection of life and art.

Thirty-one Americans.

Dawn Downey writes essays about her journey through everyday life. The question she strives to answer: How does a sensitive elder woman of color thrive in an insensitive, white-centered, male dominated, youth-oriented culture? The author of six books, she also writes “Dawn Downey’s Teachable Moments,” a Substack newsletter. Blindsided: Essays from the Only Black Woman in the Room earned Book of the Year Finalist honors from the Independent Author Network. Downey lives with her husband in Kansas City, Missouri. Learn more at DawnDowneyBlog.com

We Who Walk the Seven Ways

Excerpt: We Who Walk the Seven Ways

University of Nebraska Press

Native And Indigenous Studies | Memoir

Growing Old in a Beautiful Way

This morning I watched a red-tailed hawk circle up from the bottom of the canyon and glide past, wings spread wide to catch the wind. Then a second hawk glided past, and then a third arrived in the air and was joined by a fourth and all of a sudden Auntie showed up, just as strong in my mind as she had been in life. I remembered the way she answered my questions by telling me to put it in my holy center and not to think about it too much, to just let the answer come in its own time. I returned to the times when Auntie would surprise me by talking about what was good medicine and bad, and how to figure out what to do, and not do, if power was given.

Her shoulders had bent as she grew older, but Auntie always stood straight as a young girl when she told me her stories. Her words sounded like wind shaking the leaves on a tree.

Auntie’s stories began in the evening, as the sun was going down. The turquoise beads she wore on Sundays made her white hair shine. Her skin was like dark smooth clay and when she laughed, she held her hand in front of her mouth hiding her bare gums. Before bed, she gathered me and all of the girl cousins and reminded us to remember our dreams and to feel our feet growing up from the ground so we would be able to find our paths within the great circle in relation to how Indigenous people viewed the world... Continue reading

We Who Walk the Seven Ways is Terra Trevor’s memoir about seeking healing and finding belonging. After she endured a difficult loss, a circle of Native women elders embraced and guided Trevor (mixed-blood Cherokee, Lenape, Seneca, and German) through the seven cycles of life in their Indigenous ways. Over three decades, these women lifted her from grief, instructed her in living, and showed her how to age from youth into beauty.

With tender honesty, Trevor explores how the end is always a beginning. Her reflections on the deep power of women’s friendship, losing a child, reconciling complicated roots, and finding richness in every stage of life show that being an American Indian with a complex lineage is not about being part something, but about being part of something.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Terra Trevor is an essayist, memoirist and the author of We Who Walk the Seven Ways (University of Nebraska Press). She is a contributor to fifteen books and her essays appear widely in journals and anthologies, including Tending the Fire: Native Voices and Portraits (University of New Mexico Press), Children of the Dragonfly: Native American Voices on Child Custody and Education (The University of Arizona Press), The People Who Stayed: Southeastern Indian Writing After Removal (University of Oklahoma Press), Unpapered: Writers Consider Native American Identity and Cultural Belonging (University of Nebraska Press), Voices Confronting Pediatric Brain Tumors (Johns Hopkins University Press), Take A Stand: Art Against Hate (A Raven Chronicles Anthology), News From Native California, Yellow Medicine Review: A Journal of Indigenous Literature, Art, and Thought. She is the founding editor of River, Blood, And Corn Literary Journal. Visit her at Terra Trevor: Writing, Reading and Living.

Poetry by E. Fox

Ink & Lead

I’m too afraid to be that of the bold permanence.

Afraid to be the spilled ink seeped into the bones of a page.

Etched not only into the surface but run deep into one’s core.

With the daring stance of unwavering line after line.

Forever waiting to be scrutinized and yet still stay unchanged.

Never truly able to be erased.

Meekly covered in an attempt to be conformed.

All I ever will be is the faded lead.

The blended marks left on the page.

Standing alone in despair.

Left for others disposal.

Bringing the weight of everything sinking down.

Drowning to the bottomless pit of one’s mind.

Blackened with the ink pressed over my skin.

Seeing what is left in my wake.

Only after I’ve been erased.

Flesh Filled Face

You know that feeling when you see another beautiful person

And you can’t help but touch your own delicate skin in response

I can’t help but notice that mine is not so delicate

Not so beautiful

It feels as a softer mask waiting to be peeled from the bone

The flesh sits atop my skull in mock disguise

Seeing another beautiful person only makes me realize that I am not that

I am only a faceless entity waiting to truly figure out who I am

A Role, Not a Model

My dad never loved me, I know it

He liked me when I was just a small child

Until I got older and then

Then he didn’t even like me

I realize now it wasn’t hate when I was growing up

It was only dislike

It became hate as I aged more and more

But once I was “old enough,”

He started to like me once again

Or at least what he could make me to be

He liked that I didn’t like “her”

But he never realized I hated him too

It was almost in the same way he did me

But I was so much younger

I just wanted to be happy and loved

He never accepted my choices

They weren’t his, so neither was I

Even now it is the same

It always has been

And always will be

First published in Yellow Medicine Review: A Journal of Indigenous Literature, Art & Thought

Fox is an Indigenous aspiring poet from the Arikara and Lakota-Sioux Nations who was born and raised in North Dakota. They have been a lover of books & reading from a very young age, always searching for more to fulfill themself with as time has gone forward. Their published works can be seen featured in Yellow Medicine Review's 2023 Fall Edition. Fox's motivation in writing stems from their want to reach all communities and show the ability along with the importance of Native American & LGBTQ+ youths' writing about the experiences of growing up & coming of age. Fox is currently a recent high school graduate with the hopes of transitioning to a career in creative writing through workshops and apprenticeships. With every gained experience, they are working on a collection of poetry with aspirations to soon publish a book of their own that will help take off their career in writing.

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

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.

Yugtarvik: A Tʌndrə’d Glimp

by Alice Rose Crow ~ Maar’aq

Alice Rose Crow ~ Maar’aq is among the kass’ayagat of the Kusquqvaq diaspora. She is an independent maker based in Anchorage, Alaska. For the Covid-19-year of 2021, the Anchorage Museum at Rasmuson Center invited Alice to curate a series of creative interpretations to augment ongoing efforts to examine archived collections. A mutual and consolatory goal is to bring attention and reflection to little known and overlooked elements living within the Anchorage Yugtarvik.3 An inclination is to keep stepping toward broadened and deepened groundedness, mutual acknowledgment, contemplation, engagement, understanding, deep dialogue, and sharing among First Alaskans, relatives, migrants, expats, and allanret4 across generations, languages, and amid evolving cultures, technologies, and world views.

Her mixed form 2021 collection commissioned by the Anchorage Museum,Yugtarvik: A Tʌndrə’d Glimp, is available via the yugtarvik’s website.

Yugtarvik: A Tʌndrə’d Glimp is also available for direct digital download:

https://view.flipdocs.com/?ID=10017700_675590