Dear Chebon

by Chip Livingston

Chipper Boy, I don’t expect this to frighten you none, Chebon, receiving my message like this, as you’ve always been tuned for reception. But write it down, so you remember, and share my words with those who might need them. I’m taking advantage of the holiday prayers and chimney smoke to work a bit of your Paw-Paw’s old Solstice magic to make sure this missive gets through. Obviously you’ll have to clean up my grammar some. I could do all sorts of things with a wrench or hammer, but words, grandson, those are your tools. I took just enough book learning to sign my name away on bills and send you short notes in college. 

Away is a funny word to think about, here from the spirit world you might call West of Heaven, but we’re closer than most people think. Your ancestors aren’t just floating around in some far-off place. We’re also there on the earth, watching with you as the creeks freeze and thaw, smiling and laughing mostly at your forgetfulness, reminded of our own fleshly shortcomings. But where we are, we know a wholer sense of empathy. Especially now, grandson, when you’re holding on to worries larger than your heads conceive the world. 

You forget, Chebon, some of the things I told you as we walked the land, picking up empty beer cans and gathering pecans. The trash we can recycle, and the task to break the stubborn shells is worth the sweet inside. But just now, you ain’t worrying none about pecans or the 40 cents a pound we got for bags of aluminum. You think the whole world is ending. But only parts of it are ending – and only as you’ve known them, the little what you know of it. We keep learning. 

The United States has always been a figment of some white folks’ imagination. Democracy? Tell your Paw-Paw a better one. You took some history from me and some from books, but what you seem to forget is what you stand on stays forever. That land in Alabama, Colorado, Uruguay, and all the rest of it, it’s been here since crawfish brought the mud up and long before the thought of humans. That land will be here long after the memory of us, Chebon. The earth is taking a beating, sure, and tides will rise. But the land itself withstands. As do we, son, but in forms you don’t yet understand but will in time to come. 

Time to come, grandson, you’ll also understand that election as a duration every people face and our people in particular have already several times survived. Your blood’s a testament that in a long line of troubling history, it’s nothing you can’t handle. The president of the United States in the year 2018 is not going to be what ends human life. Don’t believe apocalyptic lies. There is no Armageddon. But of course there will be consequences.

Confusion, pain, division. Fear. It won’t always be clear who or what to believe. You sure won’t have to dig up distractions. They’ll be near. But so will the gathering of a new kind of nation. The continent is calling out for its true citizens, restoring the balance of brown people who first emerged upon its mud; it’s telling you the land is almost ready for your occupation. You’re coming out from underground – just like your ancestors. Your volume now is just an ankle rattle but it’s growing toward a hum. Listen for the drums that lead toward syncopation. Syncopation! How’s that for your Paw-Paw’s eighth-grade education! But it’s true, Chebon. Trust me. There’s a song if you listen. That’s a promise. Keep listening until you know the tune. Then write a new verse. Sing that prayer into the world. Direct the chorus. 

Chipper Boy, this ain’t a scolding. Sure, I’m prone to coaching but this is also a celebration. You exist. Despite everything they’ve done to us, you exist. With everything they’re doing now to silence and undermine your objections and confidence, Chebon, you exist. As long as you’re alive to witness and protest, you still exist. So don’t get down. Instead get up and shout. Then dance. Don’t forget to stomp and dance. Feel your feet on the loose sand. That’s your freedom. 

And what comes after this muddy patch is so much better, more solid, more united in humanity than the planet has yet seen in our living history. 

This message is a recognition of you and the Helpers who clamor at the real chaos of earth’s growing pains. It’s an awakening. A celebration of a new awareness. And it’s a great big thank you. We’re grateful, son – Mvto, Chebon – to everyone who’s paying attention. We’re paying attention. All Creation is listening. Make your noise but also remember to quiet down and distinguish the truth from illusion. Keep your chin up. You’re not returning underground but there are times you’ll have to tread water. This is just another one of them. And I taught you how to swim. 

But the earth will remain. And we’re not going anywhere. Remember as you walk the land your relatives prepared for you: Prepare the world as best you can for what you’ll leave behind. Life is still a celebration. Trust me, grandson. There’s a reason we don’t have a word for goodbye. 

Your Paw-Paw 

First published in Radical Hope: Letters of Hope and Dissent in Dangerous Times, Vintage Books.

Copyright © Chip Livingston. All rights reserved.  

Chip Livingston is the author of a novel, a collection of essays and stories, and two poetry collections. His writing has appeared on the Academy of American Poets’ and the Poetry Academy’s websites; and in Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, New American Writing, and other journals and anthologies. Chip teaches in the low-rez MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, NM. He lives in Montevideo, Uruguay.

Alphabet of the Republic

by Chip Livingston

Always I’m asked what I love about Uruguay.

Because the food, I say, because the people. Because the rhythm of the place, the Culture. Carnaval. Candombe

Drums that demand I dance. It’s different:

Everything. Its Education – free through university and evidently effective. Everyone seems wise, well-read, and worldly. It’s egalitarian. And though I know one Richie Rich, the majority of people are equal. They treat each other as equals. It’s

Fun, I mean, fatal, just

Going to the grocery store, a walk in my

Hawaianas to practice my holas. The Healthcare – universal and fucking fantastic.

lemanja, the goddess of the ocean. Idea Vilariño, the first poet whose collected works I read entirely in Spanish.

Jacarandas.  

Karaoke at Il Tempo. Kioskos to buy my tobacco y hojillas.

Loros, the small green parrots that top the palmeras. La Paloma in Rocha, where I’ve beached seven summers.

Llaves antiguas – old skeleton keys to open my doors, and, oh man, the beautiful doors of Uruguay. There are photo books and collage posters of the puertas in Montevideo. I take

Mate at merienda, I

Nap at siesta,

Obey the rhythms of my borrowed land.

Public transportation. Public wifi. Public Welfare. Public exercise equipment. Institutions that actually serve the public.

Queso. I guess it makes sense that if Uruguay has the most natural beef in the world, its dairy would be as pure. Quince paste, which they call membrillo, and I have a story about that for another time.

Really it’s remarkable I haven’t mentioned the meat.

Rrrreally rrrremarkable but

Seriously, Uruguay outlawed antibiotics and hormones in its livestock in the 1970s, it’s banned Monsanto and GMOs, imported

Transgenic foods are marked with a yellow triangled T.  Tomatoes still taste like tomatoes in

Uruguay; bananas still have seeds. It’s a long trip south but

Vale la pena. Now if I shortened “vale la pena” to just “vale,” it would suggest I’m from Spain. The abridged version in Uruguay is “dale,” used like “okay,” pero ta,

You know I love learning those distinctions between spellings and palabras.

Zorrilla.

Zorrilla’s on the twenty-peso note, which you can imagine as a dollar, Juan Zorrilla de San Martin, an epic Uruguayan poet, whose home, bought by scholars of the state, is now a national museum; a street and park are named for him. Juana de Ibarbourou appears on the thousand peso, another poet. The hundred peso features Eduardo Fabini, a musician and composer. Do you know what I’m getting at? The Uruguayan money has artists and thinkers on it. And I think about the killers I carry in my U.S. wallet.

Zumba, my first onomatopoetic Spanish word, the drowsy bee’s buzz.

Yerba Mate, obviously, if you know me. I’ve nearly always got a mate full of yerba, the Guaraní herb that motors the world’s most nocturnal country, Uruguay.

Xcept Uruguay isn’t really the country’s name. No tiene nombre oficial but is officially known as La República Oriental del Uruguay, the republic east of the Uruguay River, referencing itself by location, by the X on the upside-down map, and uses the indigenous name of the nearby river, this cattle country crossed and bordered by rivers and sea, its bays a sweet and salty mix,

Which are just some of why and what I love about this watery paisito, the first time I met her crossing the Río de la Plata from Buenos Aires, on a whim, a mention, just the first weekend of a 10-day escape from North American winter with another U.S. writer. We decided within 24 hours to stay the entire holiday in Uruguay.

Verdad. Era verano. It was summer in our wintertime. Carnaval. And we toured the Atlantic beaches, convinced we’d been secreted into a kind of heaven, as if the venteveos saw and sung to us, the velas lit for Iemanja an extraordinary riverside welcome, warm beacons with carnations, coins, watermelons. Y acá volvimos, vivíamos, y yo vivo de nuevo.

Uruguay. Uruguay. Uruguay.
“Ur-u-guay? You’re a guy?”
“Ur-u-guay? You’re a gay?”You’re a single gay guy living in Uruguay? Que suerte, che! Uuuuu!

Ta! It’s tranquilo, and truth be told, todavía no sé what it is to be exact. Todo: los tomates, las tortas fritas, los teros, el tortugon, el tango, los tambores. The drum groups in the streets, the people on their feet, the two beats that keep the culture dancing. Los tambores. Los tangueros. The tango. The tambores. And los Tupamaros.

Spanish as a second language. I’d studied a semester with a Spaniard, had Cuban friends teach me to cuss, heard my share of Puerto Rican pillow talk, but learning to speak Uruguayan Spanish, No es poca cosa. No es Catalán, cierto, pero casi Canario, an idioma of opposites, where a former prison is now a luxury shopping mall and the current prison is called Freedom, where barbaric and fatal are adjectives for amazing, where to experience joy is to die or to be killed by something. Sino es así, no? O sí? Sí no? See?

RR. Errrrrrrrre. Mi perrita, mi porro, mi ferrocarril. Mi fat yankee tongue trying to roll the double RR. Joderrrrrrrr!

Really, I don’t know if that will work on the page. The Rambla: among my first and constant appreciations, Montevideo’s Rambla is 13.7 miles of uninterrupted sidewalk along the river and up the Atlantic coast; it’s where Montevideanos ramble, rest, relax, and meet for mate, to read, to exercise, to take sun, run. Its rhythms still and accelerate me. Requesón.

Que tal? How’s it going? Quizás you’re wondering how much love for this little country I’m going to share. I’ll try to be quicker.

Pero el problema es you can’t rush a Uruguayan, and I am growing more Yourugua every day, and there are a lot of things I love in the republic that start with P: poets, there are so many poets, and the people actually read poetry. There are poems etched in marble in public plazas. The people read! And the people are kind, helpful, pretty and peaceful – until it comes to fútbol, then it’s back to the killing metaphors. But Pizza. Pasta. Pan de Azúcar, where I saw a live wild black puma in a sheep pasture. Ah, population statistics: there are seven sheep for every human in Uruguay and there are four cows for each person. Palermo. Piriapolis. Parque Rodó. Cabo Polonio. Punta del Diablo. Palos borachos.  

Olímpicos and other sandwiches de miga. Las ondas buenas, ojalá, y obvio eating

Ñoquis on the 29^th  of every month.

Niños envueltos, delicious sausage in cabbage with a tortuous name, wrapped children. Riquísimos son.

Mira! Mate, mimos, mercados, murgas, the meat (see “Carne”), medialunas at merienda, the extra meal. They have four meals a day in Uruguay! And merienda suits me, soothes mi hambre at North American dinnertime. I have to mention Mujica, the former president, his example, history, and his changing the face of the republic to el mundo.

Lluvia. I love the fucking rain in Uruguay and it’s a good thing because this country is elemental, water falling into water, sky and sea, sea and earth, sol and sky, where llamadas call me to my feet for their ensayas y desfiles.

Lemeyun, and I’m even allergic to onions, but this Armenian-inspired Uruguayan dish is like, paf!, a grilled pita bread topped with spiced citrus beef ceviche.

Kisses – abundant as bread – and everything starts and ends with a beso. How tender and wholesome and masculine and shattering of macho North American stereotypes of how two humans can so naturally touch each other. Granted this is one kiss on the cheek, but there are exponential expressions of their comfort with intimacy.

JAJAJA is how they text laughter. Y les gusta reir. And I laugh at how distant my language just got when I spoke of showing affection. I have a lot to learn yet. Jamón y queso. Juas? 

lemanja, I have mentioned, an important figure in my knowing the country and my gratitude. Part of my introduction,

How we arrived the first time the weekend of her birthday, February 2, and joined Montevideo on Playa Ramirez to light candles and leave her regalos on the sand and in the sea. Olas de hermosas holas. Horneros. Y hombres excepcionales.  Guapos. Guapas. Gauchos. And Gooooooooooooooooool! We’ve gotten to Fútbol! And I’ve become a fanatic. Ya fui a mi first clásico, between Peñarol y Nacional, and now only lack one task to becoming unofficially Uruguayan – learning to play truco – but of my fondness for the other game. Obviously it has a lot to do with futbolistas. Fainá. Y bueno ta, no falta mucho para el fin, and 

Everything yet to be said yet an expression of some sorts shared. Empanadas. I don’t know if Uruguay invented the tango or empanadas, but it has perfected them.

Desfiles of diversity and marches for more derechos humanos, and the country is already known to be the most humanitarian in the Americas. The first country in the world to legalize marijuana, the first country to allow a woman to file for divorce, one of the few Latin American countries where abortion is safe and legal. Gay marriage, claro, like it was never a question. Uruguay elected a transgender senator and a female vice president.

Chorizos, choripán, chivitos! But Che, escuchame, the way Italian, Spanish, and African genes have mixed with los Charrua.

Carne, the best meat in the world. Happy cows and 52 cuts of beef: pulpón, asado, entrecot, lomo, nalga, peceto, vacío, colita de cuadril, morcilla sweet or salty, chinchulín, chorizo. I dated a carnicero. I dated a cowboy. Carnival drums and murgas, parades and bailarinas, las comparsas, la cumparsita, a never-ending series of cenas and cumples.

But because the rhythm of the place I say, because the people: because the food, which centers on the Asado, the barbecue, and ends with aplausos for the asador.

First published in Carve magazine in 2018

Copyright © Chip Livingston. All rights reserved.

Chip Livingston is the author of a novel, a collection of essays and stories, and two poetry collections. His writing has appeared on the Academy of American Poets’ and the Poetry Academy’s websites; and in Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, New American Writing, and other journals and anthologies. Chip teaches in the low-rez MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, NM. 
He lives in Montevideo, Uruguay.

Punta del Este Pantoum

By Chip Livingston

Accept my need and let me call you brother,

Slate blue oyster, wet sand crustacean,

In your hurrying to burrow, wait.  Hover.

Parse opening’s disaster to creation’s

Slate, to another blue-eyed monstrous sand crustacean,

Water-bearer.  Hear the ocean behind me,

Pursued, asking to be opened, asking Creation

To heed the tides that uncover you nightly.

Water-bearer, wear the water beside me,

Hide your burying shadow from the shorebirds,

But heed the tides that uncover you nightly.

Gems in sandcastles, stick-written words,

Hidden from the shadows of shorebirds,

Washed over by water.  Water’s revelatory

Gems, sand, castles, sticks, words –

Assured of erasure, voluntary erosion.

Watched over with warrior resolution,

Crab armor, claws, and nautilus heart,

Assured of a savior, reconstruct your evolution,

Clamor to hear, water scarab, what the tampered heart hears.

A scarab’s armor is light enough to fly.

In your hurry to burrow, wait.  Hover.

Hear the clamor of the crustacean’s heart.

Heed this call of creation. Call me brother.

  

First published in SING:Poetry of the Indigenous Americas
The University of Arizona Press, 2011

How is it 

we stopped for directions to Cabo Polonio

and I smelled Fry bread? It couldn’t be,

I said, telling you quickly my hungry Indian

history.  You replied Estas son tortas fritas,

una comida del campo desde hace mucho tiempo,  

then Oh my God, those are my grandfathers!

And there they were, from Aguas Dulces,

visiting an old friend who ran the roadside stand,

a woman already wrapping the sweet dough

and packing it in a plastic bag with napkins

for us to eat on the sand dunes, trying to figure out

with your grandmother how long it had been

since the last time she’d seen you, only then

as tall as the hand she held at the pocket

of her thin denim skirt, and how was it again

that you and she were related.  I watched this

in English, waiting to taste the difference

I wouldn’t find in what your ancestors

and my ancestors fed us.  How is it

we shared this flour and fat they fried

as golden as buttered toast, on a dune buggy

ride to a village without roads or electricity,

ate this ancient bread on ancient rocks

watching seals you call los lobos

de mar, envisioning a new Picasso? 

We ate these tortas as the sun dove,

as the moon rose a day before it would be full,

telling each other the names of our appetites

in two languages winnowed down to basics:

Do you like me? Do you like the bread? How is it?

First published in SING: Poetry of the Indigenous Americas 
The University of Arizona Press, 2011

  

Copyright © Chip Livingston. All rights reserved.

Chip Livingston is the mixed-blood Creek author of two collections of poetry, CROW-BLUE, CROW-BLACK and MUSEUM OF FALSE STARTS, and a collection of short stories, NAMING CEREMONY, Lethe Press, 2014. Chip has received fiction awards from Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas, Wordcraft Circle of Writers and Storytellers, and the AABB Foundation. Chip grew up on the Florida-Alabama border and now lives in Colorado, where he teaches writing online, and is a faculty mentor in the low-rez MFA program at Institute of American Indian Arts in New Mexico. 

Ghost Dance

By Chip Livingston

I think I’m going crazy when I see my reflection in the camera’s lens.  I’m surrounded by the dead.  Jimi, Marilyn, Joan — face covered in cold cream, hand holding wire hanger high above her head.  The Halloween Parade has paused for television crews in front of The Revolver on Duvall Street in New Orleans.  I duck inside for a drink, take the elevator to the thirteenth floor. 

I walk inside the club without ID.  Tonight I don’t need it.  Tonight I’m invisible.  I pass witches, goblins, boys dressed like ghouls.  Once we were two of them.  Once we both joined the annual masquerade.  But tonight is different.  Tonight I don a plain white sheet with ink.  Circles traced around holes cut out to see through.  Another hole through which I drink, from which I breathe.

I wasn’t coming out tonight.  Didn’t plan or purchase a costume.  Wouldn’t wear one hanging in your closet.  What led me to the linens then, to quickly cut a cotton sheet into a kid’s uniform?  What drove me to this?

Beneath this sheet, your medicine bag hangs around my neck, the tanned leather pouch you made me promise never to open.  This is the first time I’ve worn it.  But no one can see it.  No one can see me.

I finish my drink, scotch neat, with a gulp, sing the invisible song you taught me, set the glass on the black wood rail, and, still singing, step onto the dance floor.

Beneath this sheet, I imitate you dancing.  My feet, awkward at first, soon find your rhythm, and my legs bounce powwow style in the steps we both learned as kids.  The steps that never left you.  I dip and turn between, around the fancy dancers in their sequin shawls and feather boas.  I shake my head like you did when your hair was long, the way you flipped it, black and shining, to the heavy beat of house music.  The music hasn’t changed much in case you’re wondering.  I dance in your footsteps; sing the invisible song; close my eyes.

When I open my eyes, I swear I see Carlo.  Impossible right, but he’s stuffed inside that Nancy Reagan red dress and he’s waving at me, sipping his cocktail and smiling.  He’s talking to Randy, who’s sticking out his tongue that way he always did whenever he caught someone staring at him.  I start to walk over but I bump in to Joan.

She’s glaring at me.  Or it may just be the eyebrows, slanted back with pencil to make it look like she’s glaring at me.  She reaches past me and grabs Marilyn by her skinny wrist and pulls her away, but Carlo and Randy are gone.  Where they stood are faces I don’t recognize.  Faces dancing.  Masks I realize.  Faces behind masks.

The DJ bobs furiously with pursed lips, headphones disguised as fiendish, furry paws, in the booth above the floor.  He introduces a new melody into the same harping beat, and I remember to dance.  I remember you dancing.  My fingers slide across your sweaty chest, and I find your necklace.  The sheet clings to my body in places.  The new song sounds just like the last song but I’m suddenly crowded by strangers.  I can no longer lift my legs as high as I want to, so I sway in place, shuffle with the mortals on the floor.

Behind me someone grabs me, accidentally perhaps, but I turn, violently, jealously.  There are too many people in this equation.  Twos become one again and again, and ones become twos.  All around me real numbers add up to future possibilities.  Imaginary numbers.  It’s why we’re here dancing. 

A cowboy nods his hat in my direction.  But he can’t be nodding at us.  We’re invisible.  I think maybe he is a real ghost; he’s peering intently into the holes cut out for my eyes.  He looks like Randolph Scott, blond and dusty, so I look around for Cary Grant as Jimi lifts the guitar from his lips and wails.  Randolph Scott is coming this way and I turn my back and dance.

I want you back, Elan.  I want you back dancing beside me.  I start chanting this over and over to myself.  I want you back.  I want you back. 

You taught me the power of words.  I believed you.  I can even smell you now.  Sandalwood oil and sweat.  I turn and expect to see you. 

Not you behind me. 

Not you beside me.

Not you in front of me.

Not you anywhere around me. 

I make my way to the bar, but the bar is too crowded.  The barman’s face grimaces over hands holding folded dollars as he tries to keep the glasses filled. The air is thick with smoke.  It’s hard to breathe.  I make my way to the door, notice the cowboy trailing me.  In the elevator, I go down alone.

Into the rain on Duvall Street, we walk out together.  One set of footprints splashes our muddy way home, then, turning, I realize we are not going home, but passing more pagan tricksters decked out as holiday spirits. 

            The bells in the clock tower tell me it is midnight.  Squeaking from its hinges, the door to morning slowly opens and it’s All Saints Day, the Day of the Dead, and I am walking toward Boot Hill, to where you are buried.

We’re alone in the cemetery, and the wind lifts the rain in a mist rising up from the wet earth that is claiming me.  I remove my sheet in front of the cement memorial that holds your body up above the boggy ground.  I remove my shoes.  I strip off everything except your leather pouch around my neck, and I dance for you.  My legs are free and I whirl and sing.

I’m dancing for you now, because you loved to dance.  I want you back dancing.  I want you dancing now. 

I’m dancing for you now, because you loved to dance.  I want you back dancing.  I want you dancing now. 

I’m dancing for you now, because you loved to dance.  I want you back dancing.  I want you dancing now.

I’m dancing for you now, because you loved to dance.  I want you back dancing.  I want you dancing now.

Ghost Dance, was first published in Boulder Planet  and is reprinted from "Museum of False Starts" by Chip Livingston (Copyright 2010). Reprinted by permission of Gival Press.

Chip Livingston is the mixed-blood Creek author of two collections of poetry, CROW-BLUE, CROW-BLACK and MUSEUM OF FALSE STARTS, and a collection of short stories, NAMING CEREMONY, Lethe Press 2014. Chip has received fiction awards from Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas, Wordcraft Circle of Writers and Storytellers, and the AABB Foundation. Chip grew up on the Florida-Alabama border and now lives in Colorado, where he teaches writing online, and is a faculty mentor in the low-rez MFA program at Institute of American Indian Arts in New Mexico.