Golden Eagles over Franklin Mountain

by Robert Bensen

On Oct. 25, 2018, we counted 128 Golden Eagles, a single-day record for eastern North America. The previous single-day high was 71 (Nov. 11, 2015) so the magnitude of this big day cannot be overstated. The reason for this Golden Eagle push two weeks before the traditional migration peak, is unknown.  

                                                            —Andy Mason, Franklin Mountain Hawkwatch 2018 Report

The scaffold bristled with digital Yashicas clamped on scopes

and monopods strutting in khaki and camouflage, as a flock

of hawk-watchers scanned quadrants of sky from Otego 

to the peaks where the Susquehanna swerves into the valley, and east.

I stood by, naked eye aswarm with floaters the one,

the other useless that magnifies and smears every human face.

Peter, half-felled by flu, and Becky tallied the count 

and helped the dozen-some visitors identify specks 

that could be buzzard, or goshawk, or harrier, or sharp-shinned

or rough-legged or Cooper’s or red-tailed hawks, or merlin, falcon,

kite or kestrel, among twenty-nine listed, including Unknown Raptors, 

hoping for Goldens riding the polar stream from Canada, or, better, one

gliding low and hungry on a hunt.  I couldn’t see diddle.

And it seemed weird to me to have the drum, but to my hand ungloved 

the skin felt warm and taut.  So I slipped away and up the path,

deer-silent for the spring of thatch underfoot.

I dug my heels in and labored up the grade, paused

to catch a breath at the hill’s brow, midway through the field                           

walled in by limb-laced fir and hardwood, when a shape or shadow rose—no, 

an enormous bird rose above the brim and—Wait! I yelled and I swear

                                                                                                                        

it gave pause mid-air while bone-chilled I fumbled the drum,

and out of a cloud of sage-smoke started a roll of thunder

that closed in, closed fast and passed, then the song brought

a line of thunders helping the verse find drafts and currents 

to ride and sign God-knows-what to the bird, white flame-tongued

wings that skimmed the tree-rim, gliding so slowly with the song

that so tethered the two of us it seemed the wall of trees revolved

the way between the potter’s thumb and fingers the new bowl turns.

We shared the easy slip of air around the bowl of circled trees.

Once around, his flight feathers splayed, trimmed then splayed,

eyes holding steady gaze, with each lift of song a fresh wind.  A quick

turn of his head and he vanished.  Who’d not be at first forlorn? 

But filled with that glory who’d mourn or sorrow for long

or deny he’d gone to let the others of his kind know,

ready for passage through this valley to the Catskills, that here,

here someone had kept the song the eagles gave so long ago: 

Wanbli gleska, naha anunca, heya a uh chun kay.

Mea trocha heya anpetu wawakeay:  

“Golden eagles, Spotted eagles, the first to fly with the dawn,

come see this one trying to become a human being, come see.”

So they did and were counted: one-hundred twenty-eight strong. 

© Robert Bensen. All rights. Reserved.

www.robertbensen.com

Robert Bensen has published six collections of poetry, including Orenoque, Wetumka and; Other Poems, and Before. His work has earned an NEA poetry fellowship, the Robert Penn Warren Award, the Harvard Summer Poetry Prize, and Illinois Arts Council and NY State Council on the Arts awards. His scholarship in the Caribbean and Native America has produced essays, studies, and editions, won fellowships from the NEH and Newberry Library, and led to teaching in St. Lucia, Trinidad and Tobago, and Venezuela. He is the editor of Children of the Dragonfly: Native American Voices on Child Custody and Education. He is Emeritus Professor of English at Hartwick College (1978-2017).  He teaches at SUNY-Oneonta, and conducts a poetry workshop at Bright Hill Literary Center, Treadwell.

Marching orders

by Deborah Jang

Sometimes pre-dawn I pretend

I’m hiding from the Nazis

I slo mo breathe in semi-darkness
inches from light sleeper 

Each inhalation rising smooth
drawn deep from belly

ballooning lungs, up open throat,
a u-turn at the larynx

Then straight out rounded lips
suspended in a gentle O

All of the above of course —
silent, slow, steady.

If we were in Krakow
a frosty puff would linger.

Here, into a world of hurt,
this one bare breath alights.

I make myself a secret, a refugee
from sight. A figment of creation.

Arm waves softly through dark air.
No creak. No chafe. No bristle.

No cough. No smacking of dry lips.
No errant bump or sniffle.

With focused grace the body knows
the margins of its bearing.

A patch of air is all that lies
between liberty and terror. 

Trampling boots kick hard against
the mind’s hard won freedom.

Flesh winces at the thought
of quick, steel toed precision, 

of the pounding at the door,
the stench of human danger.

History guts presence
with shards of hate and fear. 

Renders mute our sorrow.
sends us to our caves

where in sacred silence
each breath softly quickens.

We make way through harrow
in dusky daring measure.

Mind’s eye searches escape routes
past the brink of dire.

If we were in Krakow we’d pile
in the cellar, shush the baby sister,

lock eyes with the neighbors.
cringe into harsh light.

Would I not go gentle
without hiss or fight?

Would I link arms with others
and march into harm’s way?

Would I face tall gallows
with head held up high? 

Would I offer comfort
on the train to chambers?

Not look away or wither
from the cruel of might?

Moon and sun trade places.
I breathe in morning skies. 

I pray with extra fervor.
I note the warning signs.

Practice silence in the air
Walk with care, stare down demise.

Ease each out-breath into flow.
Let each find its way to brave

whole and holy into the fray.
Breath by breath by breath, unhide.

Marching orders is included in Float True by Deborah Jang.

© Deborah Jang. All Rights Reserved.

 

Deborah Jang writes her way through the mysteries, perplexities, and joys of being human — on this planet, at this moment, in this skin. She is also a visual artist, engaging connection through forms and objects. She wanders between Denver, CO and Oceanside, CA; between mind and heart; between land and sea. She is the author of Float True. 
deborahjang.com

Read Native Authors. Hear Native Storytellers.

To ensure the voices of Native American and Indigenous writers and storytellers – past, present, and future – are heard throughout the world. 

—Lee Francis III, Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers

Writing is a legitimate way, an important way, to participate in the empowerment of the community that names me. —Toni Cade Bambara

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

She Cries

by Linda Boyden

She stands alone, 
cold,shaking, 
four years old, 
freshly plucked 
from Mamá’s arms 
dumped into 
a cold building 
with other children, 
silent or moaning, 
all strangers. 

Above her towers a 
mountain of a man 
dark clothes, 
darker expression. 
He spews 
harsh, foreign words 
she doesn’t understand. 
She sees the anger 
etched on his face 
his eyes like a snake’s, 
cold, unforgiving. 

She wets herself 
cries harder 
her legs give out 
she sits down hard 
rough hands 
grab her 
rougher words 
sting her ears. 

She cries 
for Mamá and Papí. 
She is a good girl 
she is alone, afraid, 
and she mourns. 
She will never forget.

© Linda Boyden. All rights reserved. 

Linda Boyden is a storyteller and the author of The Blue Roses, published in 2002 by Lee and Low Books, winning their first New Voices Award. Since then it has won two other national awards and was included on the CCBC (Cooperative Children's Book Center) 2003 Choices list of recommended titles. Her second book, Powwow's Coming, was published by the University of New Mexico Press in 2007. She illustrated it making the pictures from cut-paper collage. Her third book Giveaways: An ABC Book of Loanwords from the Americas was also published by the University of New Mexico Press and again she had the privilege of illustrating the book. A recovering schoolteacher with over thirty years of experience, she has spent most of her adult life leading children to literacy. She enjoys performing at schools and working with students, school visits, storytelling programs at libraries, and presenting at writing conferences and other events around the country. Linda is a member of the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI) and Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers, and her local Redding Writers Forum. 

www.lindaboyden.com

Note to ACL who can no longer read

by Alice Rose Crow~Maar’aq 


Pray for all those who believe 
our DNA is forever tainted 
by the cosmic, brilliant truth 
that we have been here 
forever, maybe longer. 
-Adrian C. Louis, Sunset at the Indian Cemetery

It’s the first springtime since you left us here, Mr. Louie. 

I curl my lips into a warm smile. I raise my eyebrows high—my dimpled chin just a touch—to say these words aloud so you’ll know we’re still here after another weird tough winter. 

Some say you can’t see or read no more. Even so, I do still smile and write. 

Ilumun, the ones left behind are told that the ones from before will always keep looking around to see 
that we’re still here carrying on the principles they taught, teach us still. 
The ones from before—now you—check to make sure we remember 
we alone cannot send ice to sea nor do we return home alone. 
Come home, they say. 
In the Jesus of Nazareth hymn sort of way, some say 
ye who are weary, come hoo 
oo 
ome. 

It’s the first springtime in Alaska since you left us here. 

Banditries of chickadees flit and flock feed as pussies willow. 
Clusters of bleeding hearts rise up, fiddleheads curl, already yellow dandelions and iris shoots peek through even as heavy, clinging snow reblankets the mid-south of this north. 

Birch peel and bud. 
Alder and spruce join willow to stretch and branch out among rogue Maydays. 
In this season of renewal, most still know we are never meant to be European Bird Cherry trees. Help me, ACL, to flow steady with changes surrounding us. 

Off Pacific coasts, thousands of salmon—tissitsaanek neqaraat— maneuver through garbage’d saltwater as we too ready ourselves to return to fresh water flows of our true being. 

Neq’akluku: 
Listen to admonishments to remember: like salmon, we are presupposed to return to the source. 

Neqaraqtun: 
Like salmon, trust an innate sense of direction and smell and remain ready to thrash to make it home. 

Not that long ago a single Mayday squeezed in along an imaginary southern (backyard fence) line and began pushing up and out. 

Each spring that lonely chokecherry tree bud, flowered, then dropped clusters of fragrant white blossoms and spread those blooms across crumpling literary pages of schooling histories. 

Some folks called them—still call them—lovely. Take their turn praising each other’s fifty-buck worded obtuse mimicry. 

Now we hear echoes of twittered mayday calls to fringes. Hurry, chop out spreading invasives and keep those invaders out. 

Just east of Valley of the Moon bordering Chester Creek if we keep listening you could hear runoff flowing steady with plastic debris into a manmade lagoon before dumping into the inlet re-named on maps and monuments for yet another explorer who wandered in at the eve of slaughter. 

In your last spring here, a hoard of expat and mimicking volunteer ghosts with secondhand memories called out to eager social media’d to witness a culling of towering ornamentals in the name of making the native woods less welcome to an unkindness of (unwanted thieving overripe) camper making it their own way just past the best part: a huge dog lovers park installed to crowd out another kind of mongrel and guard against unsolved serial murder.

Looking down, one could see spreading congresses making home in tents, under strung up and fraying blue tarps and blurry repurposed visqueen, on soggying sleeping bags or stiffening and flattened cardboard and castoff clothes. Looking up, one could see both steadying and twinkling bright lights marking the now-gated luxury hillsides of our being. Looking forward, one could see me parking an imported sedan before running up the hill to catch my granddaughters’ laughter as they climb to the top of a rocket ship painted primary colors to send amplified messages to my awaiting ears on the steady ground. Look, granny, look! 

A rainbow coalition of all-season all-generation all-nation campers scatter around (un)taxed cities amid 
town-based and rotating extractors of ancient (arctic,) earthly, wet, heavy, light, or shiny things, hipster environmentalists sporting stickered and podded Subarus, 
unionized compulsory school educators, disorganizing academics, premium pay health care providers, 
active duty and retired-in-place military redoubling cost of living allowances by shopping for imported 
consumer goods inside patrolled gates of their very own subsidized base exchanges,
militarized police patrolling for black lettered courage to make a difference, 
bored wage slaves escaping into ravaging fantasies born in generations of crafty man camps, likewise, all manners of clergy (and too few theologians), 
the demented, disabled, misdiagnosed, and aged warehoused in licensed assisted living facilities 
staffed by minimum wage refugees escaping some other horror, 
progressive non-profiteers and social pseudo-scientists galore, 
cycles of in- and out-migrating rural poor from the bush, the islands, the Lower 48, the waters 

gentrifying exotic adventure seekers and the occasional artist and indigene, 
fishers, cabbies, drink pourers, and other fly-ins, 
sex workers and politicians, dealers, researchers and the researched, and other in-betweeners. 

Some try—but we cannot—settle in together on this stretch of stolen homeland mislabeled The Last Frontier (of red state tax credited monopolizing capitalism). 

A chunk of yellow fat,
the winter sun is circled 
by gaunt prairie crows. 
Pray for the crows. 

The day before a steady snow marked another Good Friday morning, at a towering main public library among toddlers, young children, parents, and well-clad generously retired or newly unemployed or disheveled chronically unemployed, thick-skinned folks escape the slushy cold, sneak a nap, wash with lathering warm running water, google and flip pages of local newspapers, stare blankly into space, charge a flip phone or laptop or smart phone or tablet. Some look up and smile briefly to return my outstretched handshake. 

Outside Loussac’s double front doors, a raised monument of a confidently strolling William Seward is positioned to commemorate the paltry check proffered to claim our stolen homeland. Inside there’s no Bone and Juice. No Ancient Acid Flashes Back. No Ceremonies of the Damned. No Wild Indians and Other Creatures. No Vortex of Indian Favors. No Bloodthirsty Savages. No Skins (but a single worn out DVD). No Poetry and Fiction Reading. No Random Exorcisms… 

Those proving a valid address receive a borrowing card to place books on hold and continue the wait. 

M’aider, mayday. Eventually your help will arrive. 

This spring, just west, a sord of overwintering mallards alit from a park named for a banker family. Reaching open water, they nose in, remembering to feed themselves again. 

A colony of greedy gulls dive with competing manic screeches for bits of soggy white bread thrown in for whose selfie entertainment? 

The moon pulls sewage plant treated inlet water out as a gaggle of geese skirts low along emerging mudflats to feed before continuing north and west to nest and rest. 

A lone bald eagle overlooks a pale globed man sporting xtra tuffs as a first of this season wades out of rushing runoff to untangle fluorescent monofilament fishing line — a new chokehold twisting around still tender shoreline alders. 

Does he see the signs? At least try read the ones ADF&G tacked up: Closed to Salmon Fishing signs are sandwiched there between the dug in faint-white signs with fading green lettering that once declared Habitat Restoration in Progress. Please Keep off? 

This spring— so early—crystalizing Kusquqvak river-ice thinned as it rotted. This now unfamiliar early thaw of needle ice surrounding open holes claimed more good folks.

Faltering good folks didn’t mean to escape into the shallow drink to call more good folks onto perilous ice to crawl with lifelines to drag each other out and return ourselves home.

Gasping. Almost—but so far not quite yet—speechless. 
Ma says try find the reports on your computer or cellaphone. Since I have no service at home, we listen to delayed local news to learn nothing more than to comment on the parasitic proliferating power of haphazard, flat, and distorted reportage by this generation of parachuters and certain carelessly primping award-winning go-to informants. 

In town, worn down computerized smashers are unplugged to be reconditioned. I am among those re-rescheduled to rejoin a parade of the mammogram’d. 

As I drive toward our fancy art-filled IHS-funded facility colonized on every level, I keep an eye out at the corner Holiday where the flaccid pale globed Ted Stevens International Airport air traffic controller rapist prowled. 

Brown men big gulping Steel Reserve 211 (High Gravity) sit sentinel on musty folds of soiled cardboard. One stands silently staring down at his marksalot’d sign. A couple feign to ignore staring passersby. One or two try smile and wave. The rest, if they look up, slant-cock a barely face-shifting nod. I raise my eyebrows and chin and giggle so they can see me again if they want. 

Soon I see a familiar gangly brown waif in combat boots and mud streaked bellowing khaki cargo pants. 

She is sashaying down the south side of 36th, past Spenard towards Arctic. 

She quick stops, sing-shouting to the sky and maybe for the unintended benefit of passersby craning to get a better look at another local madwoman. 

As I smile and wave, I notice her once long matted dark hair is chopped short. 

The next afternoon, she is stepping down from the curb onto Benson, then back up, down and up, up and down. ACL, seems like you knew dearest women are tested against what rots conspicuous womanhood. 

We adapt and become whole again. 

ACL, I fail to claim to be in a reservation of anyone’s mind. 

Once I did drive by Brown near a house moved and a monument raised to honor an English language namesake’s ancestor. 

I never did settle around Hopkins. 

Our declaration of independence was in being raised and taught far away to be and say as river and tundra people are. To keep going and talking even as men prowl like that time we arrived for more paper learning and that shit happened again in the high desert and at the AWP near where you once taught English. 

The red that could’ve been seen and read wasn’t yet inked. It was said: 
Not one of the red seeds 
planted will ever sprout. 
Pray for them. 

Some quietly or noisily stepped into the sunshine or shade or into the shadows to keep creating as a murder of cleverly self-appointed crows enjoined to try out-silence nervous whispers and pinched and disjointed outrage created a sideshow by repeating too-loud twittering crimsoned soundbites of (some growing portion of) a mischaracterized community outside the mainstream (now) verbally committed to (the power of) an Indian student-centered approach through which so many (more) artists are (to be) helped. Then a takedown and its accompanying re-enforced radio silence. 

Pray into the lung- 
shocking, cold wind 
shrieking freakishly into 
those boundless yucca hills. 

The blood of too many brows and pinched swollen lips dries and is wiped away. A natural blooded blush remains. 

I bite my lips against contriving a moneyed bloodied pulpit to claim anything more than what bears repeating: The well-being of real children, women, and men and our quickly or painfully slowly muttered or mumbled or muted or unsprouted or silent or scream-sung words still matter. 

In dreams I wait for the ghost brain to devour the broken & become whole again. M’aider. Mayday. Help us taste our hearts anew. 

ACL, that you might see or read then smile at my dance of tears is enough. 

We dream of dancing as wildly as your most outrageously breathless and crazy candid rifts naming the series of more sudden twisting motions of this life and complications floating in the flood of pain medicine prescribed to relieve reconstructed (hip and) knee surgeries as we swim—legless—upstream like the first slug of kings gathering to come into the mouth of our river to return home to us. 

Visiting home I gaze across river ice melting on another spring morning of my being and remember I could easily get a running start, hold air in to glide to the other side. 

I went home to a place where—pinch me—I was revisited by a towering thick yummy man, assured and clear-eyed, strong and mindful, direct and caring, a steady impatient working man whose eyes and hands and feet spoke more than open lips, a quietly loud discretion.

After inhaling I nodded a laughing uh-hm, okay, ya, yes, that will be fun to his offer to smart phone next month to share a meal. 

This sputter of delight after he rushed into worded declarations. He would be leaving soon thereafter to reunite with the high desert where he cooks for himself and collects firewood with his family, where his child’s talents will be well-educated, provided and cared for, where familiar trees rise up between spiderwebs of highways, where he makes plans and collects materials to build a home with clean inside running water, beside which he will plant more trees for just-right shade, bring in art to mark his travels, maybe plant corn and raise meat. 

ACL, when—if—we ever do share a meal, I will extend his welcome to visit me in my good life here as I will visit him in the place of his being and longing if it his wish to pick red drama, the joyous pain of it all. 

M’aider. Mayday. Help us taste our hearts anew. 

ACL, I choose to live in life-affirming philosophies our talk contains and force myself to learn a standardizing orthography. 

In Yupik country and our diaspora when someone leaves us in any month, in your case, in the fall month of moose hunts, we still say: 
Tua-i-ngunrituq. 
Tangerciqamken cam ilini. 
Piuraa. 

This is not the end. I will see you again sometime. 
Remain as you are. 

And until then and for now—Quyana— please accept this wordful thanks for your volumed reminders to remain as we are meant to be: at home in this good place of forever, maybe longer. 

First published in a slightly different form in Yellow Medicine Review: A Journal of Indigenous Literature, Art, and Thought, Spring 2019. 

© Copyright Alice Rose Crow~Maar’aq. All rights reserved.

Alice Rose Crow~Maar’aq, was born for and raised on the Kusquqvak in southwest Alaska. She nests in Spenard, a southcentral Alaska westwardly neighborhood near water and take offs and landings. Ali is a momma, granny, lover, ilung, relative, and friend. She completed an Institute of American *Indigenous Arts MFA in Creative Writing under the guidance of Chip Livingston and Elissa Washuta. Her longer works remain underway. In them she explores dynamics of holding steady and moving forward in these times of rapid change and anomie. For whatever it might be worth, Ali is a member of the Orutsararmuit Native Council and is an original ANCSA Calista and Bethel Native Corporation shareholder.