By Aja Couchois Duncan
Adze:
I
should begin with adik, with hearding mammals ranging across the boreal
expanse. To know the geography of it, to start with its features.
Your
face is this blur of fur and antler.
My
story is the history of frontier, a wooded terrain. We could not see each other
through the cacophony of trees. But I could hear you breathing. Some kind of
wind the nose sings. Adze is stripping the layers of. When the skin is torn
from muscle, cleaved from bone.
Agawaatese
is not sound but shadow. An interception of light.
Edawayi’ii:
There
are many ways to tell both sides of it. It is a preposition.
The
French mated their way through the colonies. The English claimed only their
mirror image. Later the science of alterity would explain such predilections.
Absent of Freud, native kinship systems did not distinguish between the progeny
of.
Halfbreeds
have their own word for gichi-mookomaan, for white person, for butcher knife.
Little bear girl took the knife and split herself down the middle. Little bear
girl sits beside me on the rooftop, her hair scissoring the wind. Together we
watch flora and fauna duck for cover. One is the hydrology of earthquakes, the
other less tectonic, more personal. Gichi-mookomaan is nowhere to be found.
It
is difficult to be part of a species. There is so little to distinguish
yourself from. Sapiens traveled slowly across continents, moved from trees to
terra firma. At which point did gichi-mookomaan roam?
They
have paved the surface of our habitat, but someday they too will long for the
upper canopy. Bipedalism is a fetish of the imperial view.
Optics:
The
science of sight ignores the spirit of mescaline, of cactus, of natives of the
new world.
After the earth split,
there were two,
old and new. The old world was heavy with everything
that began it. The new world was fecund,
virile.
old and new. The old world was heavy with everything
that began it. The new world was fecund,
virile.
When
the first people came out of the trees they found themselves on a wooded island
already crowded with bear and wolf. Stripping bark from the trees, they built
canoes and paddled to the other side.
When
light moves through solid particles it loses pieces of itself. It is altered
once it reaches its destination.
Omoodayaabik
is shattered, a piece of broken glass. Before it could have been anything, a
lantern, window, a bottle of whiskey. The science of sight does not trouble
itself with such inquiries. There are only the intricacies of the eye, its
mechanics of doing. The eye does not know which side of the earth it is on. The
eye cannot see the birthing folds, the suckled nipples beneath the limbs of
trees. The nose is far less complicated. There is no discipline dedicated
solely to its mysteries. But it is the nose that remembers our disastrous
origins. We are sentient. We are this scent of things.
© Aja
Couchois Duncan. All rights reserved.
Nomenclature, Miigaadiwin, a Forked
Tongue, is included in Restless Continent, published by Litmus Press. An earlier version was published as a
chapbook by CC Marimbo Press.
ABOUT THE
AUTHOR:
Aja Couchois Duncan is a Bay Area educator, writer and coach of Ojibwe, French and Scottish descent. Her writing has been anthologized in Biting the Error: Writers Explore Narrative (Coach House Press,) Bay Poetics (Faux Press) and Love Shook My Heart 2 (Alyson Press). Her most recent chapbook, Nomenclature, Miigaadiwin, a Forked Tongue was published by CC Marimbo press. A fictional writer of non-fiction, she has published essays in the North American Review and Chain. In 2005, she was a recipient of the Marin Arts Council Award Grant for Literary Arts, and, in 2013, she received a James D. Phelan Literary Award. Her first book, Restless Continent, is forthcoming in the spring of 2016 from Litmus Press. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University and a variety of other degrees and credentials to certify her as human. Great Spirit knew it all along. ajacouchoisduncan.blogspot.com
Aja Couchois Duncan is a Bay Area educator, writer and coach of Ojibwe, French and Scottish descent. Her writing has been anthologized in Biting the Error: Writers Explore Narrative (Coach House Press,) Bay Poetics (Faux Press) and Love Shook My Heart 2 (Alyson Press). Her most recent chapbook, Nomenclature, Miigaadiwin, a Forked Tongue was published by CC Marimbo press. A fictional writer of non-fiction, she has published essays in the North American Review and Chain. In 2005, she was a recipient of the Marin Arts Council Award Grant for Literary Arts, and, in 2013, she received a James D. Phelan Literary Award. Her first book, Restless Continent, is forthcoming in the spring of 2016 from Litmus Press. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University and a variety of other degrees and credentials to certify her as human. Great Spirit knew it all along. ajacouchoisduncan.blogspot.com
