Loosening Our Tongue

By Rain Prud’homme-Cranford (Goméz), Ph.D

These are things I need to say:
but language and words 
were ripped from my tongue 
Residential school 
Jim Crow feather

soldiers swarming 
our land our homes 
uprooting us from soil— 
roots dangling 
string fingers 
clinging to clutch 
clumps of Earth

These are things I need to say:
but mouth is dry 
arid fragile skin
opens bleeding
hollow space between 
tongue and teeth cracks 
from drought 
from poison water

These are things I need to say:
ancestors circle round
pepper spraying police 
choking our 
relatives’ throats— 
reaching to hold water 
slipping through fingers 
toes digging into 
brown dirt

These are things 
we need to say—
Sing us home 
shatter violent silence 
come down rain 
churning rivers 
ocean waves

We ride a tempest of 
surging water

#WaterIsLife #RezspectOurLandbase #StandingRock

©Rain Prud’homme-Cranford 2016

Rain Prud’homme-Cranford (Goméz), Ph.D., is a“FatTastic IndigeNerd,” an Assistant Professor of Indigenous Literature in the Department of English and Affiliated Faculty in the International Indigenous Studies Program at the University of Calgary. A Poetry Editor for Mongrel Empire Press (MEP) and an Editorial Board member for The Journal of Louisiana Creole Studies.

Rain won the First Book Award in Poetry from NWCA (2009), for Smoked Mullet Cornbread Crawdad Memory (MEP 2012). Critical and creative work can be found in various journals including: The Southern Literary Journal, Louisiana Folklife, Undead Souths: The Gothic and Beyond (LSU P), Mississippi Quarterly, Tidal Basin Review, Sing: Indigenous Poetry of the Americas, As Us, Yellow Medicine Review, and many others.

Rock Collection

By César Love

I seek escape, not in smoke

Not in drink

But in rocks I’ve gathered

None are boulders, few are pebbles

The perfect mass gorges my two hands

Hardness is my comfort, density my high.

The Black One brings me to outer space

The Purple, a utopian palace

The Orange, a feast devoured slowly

The Grey, a ferry to oblivion

My comedown is softness

Reality, a sinkhole in feathers

Below my pillow

I keep an opal

Always the Land

When the storms end, he is quiet to all but the deaf

Many hear the whispers of streams, the mumbles of rivers 

But below the threshold of a lapping pond

There are sounds as soft as a tadpole’s heartbeat

At volumes quieter than grass

The land delivers a wordless sermon

You are free to leave before the end, for the sermon has no end

Can you bear the spastic stillness?

If you can listen for ten minutes, you are free to ask a question.

If you can listen for an hour, you can ask for anything you need.

Ask what about your bees?

The trellis on your porch, broken by the eight-foot weeds

It’s painted and repaired, ready for the blossoms

To greet the sun and moon, ready for the blossoms

To welcome back the bees.

Listen to the honey spinning into gold

Ask what about the blackout?

Remember the fireflies you caught so long ago?

You hid them in a basement jar.

Realize you’re one of them.

Hands unlock the lid, hands let all of you free.

Listen to the land echoing your glow

Lake Chabot

Castro Valley, California

Blue water, mirror of day

Show us the breadth of the sky

Dark water, mirror of night

How lovely the moon on your throat

Sweet water, ripples and tides

Ladles of kisses

The brush of your tongue moistens our clay

Deep water, so certain the currents

Sleepless their movement

Sleepless your will

Still water, gentle the splashes

So peaceful your power

So quiet creation

The Sprinklers

Surprised on sunny park grass

The intrusion of sprinkler water

Hidden fountains meant for moonlight

Let loose by mistimed dials

An accidental shower

Perhaps you scamper from the grass

Safe and only a little wet

Perhaps they give you a hearty splash

Soaked or dry

Savor the wet sparklers

The cool of deepsome wells

This is not the Alhambra

This is not Niagara

Small rainbows

The rise and fall of water drops

An arc of musical notes

Spiring to the sky

In love enough

To fall to Earth.

© César Love. All rights reserved.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: César Love writes poems about displacement and the search for home. He can be found at open mics of the San Francisco Bay Area. His new book of poems is titled Birthright. 
http://cesarlovepoetry.yolasite.com/

Once Upon A River

By Tiffany Midge

We were the kids trading marbles and penny candy at the Friday night Grange Hall meetings. We were the deaf shopkeeper at McDougals who said the comics would set ya back two bits, and the digests two bits and a George Washington. We were the Pillager kids from your dad’s class who had you over for supper, who horrified your mom when Mrs. Pillager wiped the rain off her hounds with a dishcloth, then covered the fried chicken with the same cloth.

We were the voices of the evening church bells chiming every sunset and the Rutherford sisters who graciously invited you into their doily-drenched parlor for hot water and honey and taught you how to play Hearts.

We were the hippie mom of the kid you played with, who stored the umbilical cords of her children in the back of the freezer, and the waitress at the Silver Spoon who dished you free bowls of vanilla ice cream on slow nights. We were the man who convinced you he was going to commandeer a raft all the way to Hawaii and who you swear you saw on the TV news, safe and triumphant after he’d mysteriously left town.

We were the junkyard dog next door whose owner was jaundiced and sported a hook for a hand, and the Davenquist boy who you traded your Girl Scout Mints for a litter of baby mice that all died because the house was too cold at night, so your dad replaced them with tropical fish.

We were the general store where you ran to fetch the mail every afternoon from Box 70 and spent your ten cent weekly allowance on a candy bar, and the girl named Rudy whose newborn sister had pierced ears and whose dad smoked from a hookah pipe, and Brian Osterday who was your perfect first love and who had a brother named Royal, the name of your orange cat.

We were the Snoqualmie Bull’s Saturday baseball games your dad coached and the fat catcher named Moose who later died from a broken leg. We were Brownie meetings in the basement of the library across the street.

We were the occasional shrieking of the firehouse alarm alerting your dad, in the volunteer squad to run up the block and help save distressed babies or car engine fires, and we were creek crawdads and guppies and the steady stream of bull fish hooked from the banks of the Snoqualmie River.

We were the long days that existed solely for the pleasures of swimming in the lagoons of that river, and the sandbar where some fishermen gave you your first can of beer and where you traced pictures in the sand and buried costume jewelry and brooches stolen from your mother’s dresser.

We were the sticker bushes alongside the banks where you harvested quarts of blackberries and traded to Mrs. Higgenbottom who made you a blue pie.

We were Mary Chesum whose parents were Yakima Indians and we were the Friday night when she was abducted from the house she was babysitting at, taken to the river where she was alternately chased, then stabbed, and chased again, repeatedly—her blood and clothing spilling across the lengths of the rocky bank—by a high school senior who she’d been refusing to date.

We were Mary Chesum’s younger sister Lisa, your friend, your classmate. You were the only two Indian girls in school, the only ones with that long black hair that wrapped around your shoulders like shawls. The only two girls who knew they were different, who knew they’d be singled out; girls who paired up for safety and refuge, for shelter; ones who knew how to flee to the banks of the river, instinctually, by memory.

We were there, that day on the playground when your shoelace had broken and Lisa without hesitation unbraided her lace and gave it to you.
We watched as she bent over and threaded the lace into the grommets of your shoe, then went for the remainder of the day with her one shoe loose and undressed.

Copyright © Tiffany Midge. All rights reserved.
Once Upon A River appeared in “Native Literatures: Generations," 2010.

Tiffany Midge’s book “Outlaws, Renegades and Saints, Diary of a Mixed-up Halfbreed” won the Diane Decorah Poetry Award. She’s most recently been published in North American Review, The Raven Chronicles, Florida Review and the online journal No Tell Motel. An enrolled Standing Rock Sioux and MFA grad from University of Idaho she lives in Moscow, Idaho (Nez Perce country) and teaches part time with Northwest Indian College. 
https://tiffanymidge.wixsite.com/website

I Learned All My Spanish in School

By E.K. Keith

I never tried to pass for White

but I have been passed

because it's good to be White in America

and Mother knows best

to give a not-quite-white baby

White names that don't explain

such dark eyes and such tight curls

My name never stopped mean girls hissing

gringa cola prieta and guera and taco

brown on the inside

and not-quite-white on the outside

You would not believe how White people talk

about Other people when they think you're White

How it's more polite to say Spanish

instead of Mexican

and the subtle shift in tone

when your Mexican is discovered

your tortillas uncovered

I never tried to pass for White

but I have been passed

because White people who like me

want to give me the benefit of the doubt

and let me tell you, sister

There's nothing like White Privilege

and my mother knew it

So when people would ask

"Are you Italian or Greek?"

she would laugh and say

"Good guess!"

It is so disappointing

such dark eyes and such tight curls

fail to fit in

not White, not Mexican

I have been passed

I identify as White Trash

My mother is Mexican

but her family doesn't mind

porque no hay indios in la familia

And since I learned all my Spanish in school

it was years before I understood

It's good to be White in America

Mythic Arcade

When I was a kid in Texas

California was nothing but a dream

Not much more than a metaphor

A fantasy of golden glitz and the big screen

I bet you know a lot about Texas

I bet I know what you’ve seen

Alamo heroes, political zeroes

Ten-gallon hats and oil patch schemes

You can find surfers in Texas

Riding in the oil tanker’s wake

You can find California cowboys

They’re speeding up and down the interstate

You can’t see Texas from the inside

You can’t see the mythic arcade

Just people, running for the money

Inside California it’s the same

If you need roots, go to Texas.

If you don’t belong where you are

You might find the right place is California

Who you want to be is who you are

Siblings

Brown sparrows

sift trash from a dump

find treasure

in mounds of rotting food

plastic wrappers aluminum

cans rusting toasters

shitty diapers hairdryers

headless dolls sideways

refrigerators without doors

One brown sparrow

beats its wings in the dirt

kicks

and tangles tighter

in a six-pack plastic noose

© E.K. Keith. All rights reserved. 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: E.K. Keith shouts her poems on the street corner, and she’s just as likely to take the mic at a bar, coffee shop, or radio station. She has made San Francisco her home, although growing up in urban Texas still influences her worldview. Like most Americans, there is nothing pure about E.K.’s blood. As a result of love that mooningly ignored good sense and social boundaries across several generations, E.K. has never fit neatly into any racial, cultural, or ethnic categories. Her work appears online and in print on all three coasts and places in between, and among them are Sweet Wolverine, Haight Ashbury Literary Journal, and Nerve Cowboy. E.K. organizes Poems Under the Dome, San Francisco's annual open mic celebration of Poetry Month inside City Hall. She is a public high school teacher librarian which regularly presents opportunities for her to make the world a better place.

Fresh Wildness

By Rebecca Hatcher Travis

imbedded in every native heart

is love of land

this earth we stand on

live on

our homeland

among first memories

a part of us

like our own bodies

we know the connection

sweet *petrichor brings flashes

of childhood pleasures

we will always treasure

tender as flesh

her whipping winds

thunder rumbling

dust and rains

trembling darkness

heart-melting blueness above

our Mother

draws us outdoors

to fresh wildness

where we belong

in our special place on

this wondrous earth

*petrichor:  smell of rain

Copyright © 2016, Rebecca Hatcher Travis. All rights reserved.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Rebecca Hatcher Travis, an enrolled citizen of the Chickasaw Nation, often writes of her indigenous heritage and the beauty of the natural world. Her poetry book manuscript, Picked Apart the Bones, won the First Book Award from the Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas and was published by the Chickasaw Press. Her work has appeared in numerous anthologies, literary journals and online. Ms. Travis is a member of Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers and lives in south central Oklahoma, near the land her ancestors settled in Indian Territory days. She is currently working on another book of poetry and continues to give poetry presentations at Oklahoma venues.