A page from Smoked Mullet Cornbread Crawdad Memory
(for big sis K.R.)
They say everything is bigger
in Texas, that is propaganda.
Riding back from Albuquerque
sister at wheel. We talk, squawking
clicks, a pair of ravens making
magic with our tongues.
Keeping language carefully —
cuz we women know words are spears.
Holding breath through Texas,
Tribal plates, eagle feather, beaded
tobacco pouch swinging from rearview
mirror like lighthouse guiding
coppers:
INDIAN WOMEN TRAVELING.
Texas don’t like their Indians or
Mexicans.
Why tolerate neighbor Indians
crossing
invisible borders—never really there
to begin with? Our chatter
slows.
Silence, along I-40 through Tejas.
Sis’s car big enough to hold
eight, more with determination.
Carried folks from half the tribes
in Oklahoma to and from meeting.
Indians pilled up one on top the other,
individual lines drawn through Traverse
representing “the I-35 dividin’ line—
two different countries,” sis says.
Southeast Indians and Plains Tribes.
Sis’s car is a mini Okie Indian County.
In this car Indians slept, prayed, played.
Gone to NAC meetings crawled in
worn, tired from prayers, peyote,
fasting, mourning, rites and rituals.
This wagon sheltered, kept Indians both
sides of I-35 safe, out of cold. Housed so
many prayers doors burst vibrate singing
with medicine in languages old as earth.
We pass the Oklahoma state line,
exhale, our tongues come back to
life.
Not that we were worried, riding
in
purple peyote wagon, full of
prayers
weren’t no way we wasn’t getting home.
Pick up conversation as if silence
never
shrouded us, as true sisters
can—half
with words spoken, half with
knowing
in marrow, memory, whispers in
blood.
Looking up Oklahoma sky rolling by
stars
are so close you can ask them to
dance,
move, twirl for you, blink and
keep
an ever-watchful eye. Eyes of
those who
walked on before us. Oklahoma
night sky
hangs low over plains stretching
to meet
endless horizon. We roll forward
rhythm of
wheels making music— I swear hear
Three Dog Night sing
“Well I never been to Heaven,
but I’ve been to Oklahoma…”
First published in Smoked Mullet Cornbread Crawdad
Memory, Mongrel Empire Press, Norman, OK 2012.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Rain
Prud'homme-Cranford (Louisiana Choctaw/Creole/Mvskoke/Metis/Celtic) is the Sutton Doctoral Fellow
in English at University of Oklahoma, She won the 2009 First Book Award in
poetry for Smoked Mullet Cornbread Crawdad Memory (Mongrel Empire
Press-Fall 2012), from the Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas, (NWCA). Her second
book, Miscegenation
Round Dance: Poèmes Historiques, is currently under review and she is working on her third poetry and prose manuscript: RAW: Lwizyàn Mestizà Unsilences & other poetical
oddities. A self-described “TriRacially Fluffy and Fabulous” Louisiana Méstiza, she is of Louisiana
Choctaw, Louisiana Creole, and
Mvskogean descent paternally, and of Canadian Métis and CelticAmerican
ancestry maternally.
She was raised and grew up along the Gulf south in Mvskogean-Creole
homelands. Creative and
critical can be found in: Tidal Basin Review, Natural Bridge, SING:
Indigenous Poetry of the Americas, Yellow Medicine Review, American
Indian Culture and Research Journal, Louisiana Folklife Journal, and various others. Rain is the National Secretary for Wordcraft
Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers and as of 2012 the Assistant National Director of NWCA. She is the newly
appointed Editor-in-Chief of the NWCA Literary and Art Journal (Red), launching
Spring 2013. She lives in Oklahoma City, near her sister beadwork,
regalia, and mixed media artist Tee Shawnee and family where the sisters
collaborate and laugh with family and children.
