River, Blood, And Corn Literary Journal: A Community of Voices
Crisosto Apache named the 11th Colorado Poet Laureate
Sacred Grief
by Hollee A. McGinnis a.k.a. Lee Hwa Young
Because we lost
families and cultures
as children,
before we had words
and could only express
the loss and grief
through our bodies,
crying, acting out,
behaviors that adults want to stop,
we learned we do not
have permission to grieve.
And yet, grief is the holding
of the paradoxical and simultaneous
experience of love and loss.
We grieve because we loved.
We grieve because we have lost that love.
We loved our mothers, fathers,
sisters and brothers. And
we lost our mothers, fathers,
sisters and brothers.
Why not give permission
to grieve that love
that was lost?
This is the grief
that never gets expressed
and released: that turns
into anger, self-loathing, hate.
We have all experienced love
and the loss of that love.
Through a parent,
who did not return our devotion,
a lover, who no longer
matched our passion,
a friend who turned enemy,
a death.
We find it
hardly bearable
to imagine
we loved
so much
and were
so loved.
And not believing
ourselves to be
loveable and loved,
we cannot access
the doorway
that is offered
by sacred grief
because we are in denial
that we were ever loved.
And so, we sit
only with the loss, and
we think we are grieving
all we lost.
But the sacred grief
is the realization:
we are grieving
our knowing
of how much we loved,
of how much we are loved.
Copyright © Hollee A. McGinnis. All rights reserved.
Hollee A. McGinnis, MSW, PhD, is a scholar, writer, healer, and wayfinder. Adopted from South Korea, she has worked for decades in community organizing, policy, and research on childhood adversity, adoption, complex trauma, cultural loss, identity, and mutual aid. As a wayfinder, she integrates Western science and Eastern ancestral wisdom for transformation and healing.
A Winter Solstice Love Story
by Terra Trevor
For forty-three years I lived on the Central California Coast in an area that makes up the traditional Chumash homeland. In those beautiful days our solstice celebrations were rooted in the traditional ways of the Chumash.
Four years ago, I moved away, away from the land and people who raised and shaped me. Now I’m living near my grandchildren on the Northern California Coast. Everything is still new for me, unfamiliar. I’m walking gently while this Indigenous California landscape in Ohlone territory teaches me who I am.
For the record, I’m not Chumash. I’m mixed-blood Cherokee, Lenape, Seneca and German descent, with ties to Korean. And I hold the culture, traditions, and history of the Chumash people in my heart. This is their heritage, their life blood, and their landscape of time. And for all Native people Solstice is a time to honor the connection to our ancestors, to the rhythm of nature and our continuing deepening ties.
In my bones I remember, and I can still hear and feel the slap of the wansaks’—a musical instrument made from the branch of an elderberry—beat out a steady rhythm and a mix of laughing voices of my friends gathered contrast with the drift of fog and the heavy surf pounding. Lanterns are lit against the darkening evening and a fire is built, where storytelling takes place. Salmon is on the grill, potatoes are roasting, and the picnic table is loaded with more food. We are honoring solstice, an astronomical phenomenon marking the shortest day and the longest night of the year. For people throughout the ages—from the ancient Egyptians and Celts to the Hopi—midwinter has been a time of ritual, reflection, and renewal.
Solstices happen twice a year, around June 21 and again around December 21. The date is not fixed, it varies; the December Solstice can take place on December 20, 21, 22, 23. While we usually think of the whole day as the Solstice, it actually takes place at a specific moment when the Sun is precisely overhead the Tropic of Capricorn. Solstice helps us cultivate a deeper connection to nature and to all of the things that matter most to us. It’s a time for feeding the spirit and nurturing the soul. Prayers and rituals set forth a plan of life for the coming year, ceremonially turning back the sun toward its summer path.
Throughout history, honoring the solstice has been a way to renew our connection with each other and with acts of goodwill, special rituals, and heightened awareness. Solstice is also reserved for feeding the spirit and nurturing the soul. It’s a period for quiet reflection, turning inward, slowing down and appreciating the day, the hour, and each moment.
While we don’t know how long people have been celebrating the solstice, we do know that ancient cultures built stone structures designed to align with the sun at specific times, and in ancient times the winter solstice was immensely important because the people were economically dependent on monitoring the progress of the seasons. There was an emphasis on the fall harvest and storing food for winter.
Remembrance weighs heavy on my mind. Tonight as we near Winter Solstice, with a December moon above me, and the only light I can see, I’m falling back in time. My memories are washing over me like a series of massive waves hitting hard, without warning. As soon as I catch my breath another beautiful memory pulls me back home. My mind floats back over the years. Memories surface—and feelings that remain untouched in my heart, in that place of perpetual remembering. All those Winter Solstice nights of long ago, when we were young, and our elders walked this good earth with us, when we gathered for a good meal together, with storytelling, laughter, conversation, dance, and songs from the ancestors. Fire offerings of chia seeds, acorn flour, and berries were made, followed by prayer and ceremony.
Now, I’m in my seventies, nearly the same age as the elder Native women who guided me, informed, instructed and shaped me into the woman I am today. I’m honoring my Indigenous community with gratitude for their love and the gift of their time they gave me, helping me give to others.
With the night sky, dark and beautiful above, I walk toward the sea and stand silent in respect to the ancient peoples who left the witness of their lives, visions, and the strength of their faith for me to ponder. The scent of sage hangs in the air. I fill my lungs with it, knowing it will permeate my body and cling to my soul as a reminder of what I can feel and remember when we were together long ago.
Copyright © Terra Trevor. All rights reserved.
WomanSong
by Linda Boyden
There’s never an easy time to be a woman;
Harder yet to be a woman of Color.
You know, one of the standard four-skin
variety pack–Black, White, Red, Yellow?
But what about us MixedBloods?
What are we? The Grays? Pinks? Ecrus,
Coppers, Burt Siennas?
Color confuses.
Makes some see outrage;
Others, pity or an-in-your-face-kind-of-scorn.
Senseless. Color can’t speak the truth.
The truth lives under the color.
As each succeeding generation mutes
and blends the tones,
The blending carries us closer
To the true state of our souls,
The final destination of being Colorless.
The power of woman brings us into the world,
Leads us to the safety, comfort, and pain of our world.
If we are lucky, in the end, the power of woman will sing us through our deaths,
Carry us home,
Where there are no tints and shades,
Where there is only sanctuary, and the solace of the open arms of the Grandmothers.
Women, when there is nothing else to give your child,
Give her a song, a strong woman song.
Sing us, Mothers, sing us home.
Copyright © Linda Boyden. All rights reserved.
Linda Boyden writes children’s books and poetry. She is a member of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators and Wordcraft Circle of Native American Writers and Storytellers. She is the author of The Blue Roses (Lee and Low Books), Powwow's Coming (University of New Mexico Press), and Giveaways: An ABC Book of Loanwords from the Americas (University of New Mexico Press).
Kim Shuck Poetry
Call this time of year
Windswept and sight
Down the phone lines to
Infinity- they say-
Which
Considering our road and direction
Might be
Bartlesville a place
Misheard into another language I know it
Both the place and the
Language in a patchwork of
Supper and
Relatives
Filling station and
Random nouns a
Blanket that smells of
Grandma Mae a
Story about
Grand Lake the
Word for a specific turtle the
Feel of sandals in
Creek mud
Copyright © Kim Shuck. All rights reserved.
Kim Shuck is the 7th Poet Laureate of San Francisco Emerita. Shuck is solo author of 9 books, co-authored one, edited another ten and has contributed to a vast array of anthologies, journals, curriculum guides, tours, and protests. www.kimshuck.com
César Love Poetry
Photographs not Taken
Not the selfie before the pyramid
Not the banquet where we ate and gorged
The falcons in formation above your chimney
The crime you witnessed but your testimony ignored
That lakeside stroll when sunset rays revealed her truest beauty
Maybe you held your camera but were too in awe
It never became a photo, now it’s a minor regret.
Somewhere in the head’s rear lobe
Snapshot memories keep in Kodachrome
Some are stored in black-and-white, some in sepia tone
There they fade like everything else.
Finally you are cremated
Your mind’s gallery turns ash
Then they become something to touch
Each picture a shingle on the scales
Of the wings of your moth.
Daytime Moon
sighted at 3 o’clock at this hour,
a salt cracker
by midnight, vanilla ice cream
Request to the Whale
You beast of myth, you beast of time
Your journeys though oceans are vaster than the moon flights
The barnacles of your hide are as bumpy as the decades, as coarse as history
I am unworthy to ride on your back. Explain to me one simple thing I might understand.
Share with me one chapter from your voyages. Teach to me one vowel of your language.
© César Love. All rights reserved.
Cesar Love is a Latino poet influenced by the Asian masters. A resident of San Francisco’s Mission District, he is also an editor of the Haight Ashbury Literary Journal. He is the author of Birthright and While Bees Sleep. cesarlovepoetry.yolasite.com
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.
Copyright © Dawn Downey. All rights reserved.
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
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
Copyright © E. Fox. All rights reserved.
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
Copyright © 2024 Kim Shuck. All rights reserved.
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:
Unpapered: Writers Consider Native American Identity and Cultural Belonging
Edited by Diane Glancy and Linda Rodriguez
Unpapered is a collection of personal narratives by Indigenous writers exploring the meaning and limits of Native American identity beyond its legal margins. Native heritage is neither simple nor always clearly documented, and citizenship is a legal and political matter of sovereign nations determined by such criteria as blood quantum, tribal rolls, or community involvement. Those who claim a Native cultural identity often have family stories of tenuous ties dating back several generations. Given that tribal enrollment was part of a string of government programs and agreements calculated to quantify and dismiss Native populations, many writers who identify culturally and are recognized as Native Americans do not hold tribal citizenship.
Unpapered charts how current exclusionary tactics began as a response to “pretendians”—non-indigenous people assuming a Native identity for job benefits—and have expanded to an intense patrolling of identity that divides Native communities and has resulted in attacks on peoples’ professional, spiritual, emotional, and physical states. An essential addition to Native discourse, Unpapered shows how social and political ideologies have created barriers for Native people truthfully claiming identities while simultaneously upholding stereotypes.
César Love Poetry
Four Corners
you share with me a picture of your sunset
I would give one back to you
But my balcony faces east
instead, I offer you
A midnight
dawn
And noon
three corners of the sky
with your sunset, they are four
one diamond of the night and day
Orange
In the grocery store aisle
one belly button orange with a scar
others pristine, unblemished
others soon to be sold
Between perfect sisters
one unbidden sphere
branded by two discolored inches
not to be held
not to be tasted
A globe passed over
oceans never plunged
forests never inhaled
landscapes never painted
A world unfathomed
with a navel and a canyon scar
is the canyon east or west?
north or south?
perhaps along her belly
or across a breast
maybe against her cheek.
Moonlight at Noon
The Moon, My Shadow, and I make Three. – Li Po
I would bake on this planet
If not for the Moon I invited
She agreed to let me keep her
Tucked beneath my blouse
Her cool face against my belly
I lounge in her quiet
I swim in her well
I bloom in her sanity
The Moon brought me a friend
One who used to follow me
She mimicked my every movement
At first she flattered me
Then she mocked me
Finally, she ran away
I screamed at her,
Come back here!
I tried to put a leash on her
But she was too smart
I threw a plum at her
Of course, she thew one back
We did this for months
Then the Moon told me her name
The Poet’s Tent
North or South, she travels
Always with her tent.
On chosen ground,
She slides its rods into the earth.
She places cloth on its frame.
A cloth she imagined
Something like a Mexican rebozo
Something like an Amish quilt
A cloth that exchanges colors
That switches latticework
Cloth that vibrates to the heartbeat of deer
Cloth that answers the whispers of trees
The poet smooths the floor
She unrolls her carpet
Psychic knots detach from its tendrils:
abandoned theories
dropped desires
jettisoned memories.
They pulse on her floor.
Soon to transform
Soon to become
feral opals
protean metals
iris crystals.
She prepares the door
Butterflies of every stripe arrive
© César Love. All rights reserved.
Cesar Love is a Latino poet influenced by the Asian masters. A resident of San Francisco’s Mission District, he is also an editor of the Haight Ashbury Literary Journal. He is the author of Birthright and While Bees Sleep.
cesarlovepoetry.yolasite.com
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