River, Blood, And Corn Literary Journal

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.

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

Unpapered: Writers Consider Native American Identity and Cultural Belonging

University of Nebraska Press

Edited by Diane Glancy and Linda Rodriguez

Table of Contents and Contributors

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

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

For Q

by Kim Shuck

Pull on a different mountain range

One leg at a time

You time travel in poem

He told me

I've seen you do it

We went relic spotting

More than once

Through the line up of the '53 Dodgers

Before his heart was broken

Memories never sit as neatly in a prong setting

As a heart solitaire

Memories never sit as neatly

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

Pick a Garnet to Sleep In

Yugtarvik: A Tʌndrə’d Glimp

Unpapered: Writers Consider Native American Identity and Cultural Belonging

César Love Poetry

For Q

River, Blood, And Corn Literary Journal: A Community of Voices