By Wang Ping
I discovered “The Little Mermaid” in 1969. That morning, when I opened the door to light the stove to make breakfast, I found my neighbor reading under a streetlight. The red plastic wrap indicated it was Mao’s collected work. She must have been there all night long, for her hair and shoulders were covered with frost, and her body shivered from cold. She was sobbing quietly. I got curious. What kind of person would weep from reading Mao’s words? I walked over and peeked over her shoulders. What I saw made me shiver. The book in her hands was Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales, and she was reading “The Little Mermaid.” The day I heard the story in my kindergarten, I begged my mom to send me to school right away so that I could read the fairy tales by myself. By the end of my first grade, however, the Cultural Revolution began. Schools were closed, libraries sealed. Books, condemned as “poisonous weeds,” were burnt on streets. I thought I’d never see “The Little Mermaid” again.
My clever neighbor had disguised Anderson’s “poisonous weed” with the scarlet cover for Mao’s work. Engrossed in the story, she didn’t realize my presence behind her until I started weeping. She jumped up, fairy tales clutched to her budding chest. Her panic-stricken face said she was ready to fight me to death if I dared to report her. We stared at each other for an eternity. Suddenly she started laughing, pointing at my tear-stained face. She knew then that her secret was safe with me.
She gave me 24 hours to read the fairy tales, and I loaned her The Arabian Nights, which was missing the first fifteen pages and the last story. But the girl squealed and started dancing in the twilight. When we finished each other’s books, we started an underground book group with strict rules for safety, and we had books to read every day, all “poisonous” classics.
Soon I excavated a box of books my mother had buried beneath the chicken coop. I pried it open with a screwdriver, and pulled out one treasure after another: The Dream of the Red Chamber, The Book of Songs, Grimm’s Fairy Tales, The Tempest, The Notre Dame, Huckleberry Finn, American Dream, each wrapped with waxed paper to keep out moisture.
I devoured them all, in rice paddies and wheat fields, on my way home from school and errands. I tried to be careful. If I got caught, the consequence would be catastrophic for my entire family. My mother finally discovered I had unearthed her treasure box, and set out to destroy these “time bombs.” She combed every possible place in the house: in the deep of drawers, under the mattress, chicken coop... It was a hopeless battle: my mother knew what tricks I had in my sleeves. Whenever she found a book, she’d order me to tear the pages and place them in the stove, and she’d sit nearby watching the words turn into cinder.
When the last book was burnt, I went to the coop to sit with my chickens. Hens and roosters surrounded me, pecking at my closed fists for food. As tears flowed, the Little Mermaid came to me. She stepped onto the sand, her feet bleeding, and she could not speak, yet how her eyes and body sang and summoned me to join in! That night I started telling stories--the Little Mermaid, Romeo and Juliet, Huckleberry Finn, Aladdin...first to my siblings, friends, then to the neighbors—stories I found from those forbidden treasures, stories I made up for myself and my audience. We gathered on summer nights, in the winter darkness. When I spotted my parents in the gathering and saw the stars in their eyes, I knew I had won the war.
First published at Kinship of Rivers.
Copyright © Wang Ping. All rights reserved.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Wang Ping was born in China and came to USA in 1986. She is the founder and director of the Kinship of Rivers
project, a five-year project that builds a sense of kinship among the
people who live along the Mississippi and Yangtze rivers through
exchanging gifts of art, poetry, stories, music, dance and food. With
other artists and poets, she has been teaching poetry and art workshops
to children and seniors along the river communities, making thousands of
flags as gifts to bring to the Mississippi during 2011-12 and to the
Yangtze in 2013.
Her publications include American Visa
(short stories, 1994), Foreign Devil (novel, 1996), Of Flesh and Spirit
(poetry, 1998), The Magic Whip (poetry, 2003), The Last Communist
Virgin (stories, 2007), All Roads to Joy: Memories along the Yangtze
(forthcoming 2012), all from Coffee House. New Generation: Poetry from
China Today (1999), an anthology she edited and co-translated, is
published by Hanging Loose. Flash Cards: Poems by Yu Jian,
co-translation with Ron Padgett, 2010 from Zephyr. Aching for Beauty:
Footbinding in China (2000, University of Minnesota Press) won the
Eugene Kayden Award for the Best Book in Humanities, and in 2002, Random
House published its paperback. The Last Communist Virgin won 2008
Minnesota Book Award and Asian American Studies Award. She had two
photography and multi-media exhibitions--“Behind the Gate: After the
Flooding of the Three Gorges” at Janet Fine Art Gallery, Macalester
College, 2007, and “All Roads to Lhasa” at Banfill-Lock Cultural Center,
2008. She collaborated with the British filmmaker Isaac Julien on Ten
Thousand Waves, a film installation about the illegal Chinese
immigration in London. She is the recipient of National Endowment for
the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, New York State Council of
the Arts, Minnesota State Arts Board, the Bush Artist Fellowship, Lannan
Foundation Fellowship, Vermont Studio Center Fellowship, and the
McKnight Artist Fellowship.
www.wangping.com
Mexico and the USA: My Motherland and Fatherland
The USA is the country where I live. While the United States is not my motherland, it is the country where I have lived the longest and the country that gave me a new life, and a son. It is not the country where fate would have me be born in, but where I actually and consciously chose to become a citizen. But of course without renouncing to my Mexican citizenship.
For the longest time I rejected the idea of acquiring a new citizenship. I felt like a traitor. I don’t know when it started to grow into me. At first I thought, well, nothing will change the facts. I was born in a house with the scent of Lime and Plumeria. I grew up in a home where I would quietly stare at the clouds and the leaves of the Lime tree. Nothing could erase the memories of the smell of my mother’s cooking or the smell on a rainy day in my beautiful homeland, and the games and the joy. This love will remain untouched.
When I came to the USA everything was new to me—the smells, the places, the language, and the people. I felt so alone and out of place for the first couple of years. Then I don’t know how or when it started. I began to have a sense of belonging. I learned the language, studied, worked, had wonderful friends, and all of a sudden, I didn’t feel like a traitor anymore. I understood. I was no longer confused. For the longest time I’d had a fight within myself on where I belonged, and which country I owed loyalty to. Then one day, out of the blue, it came to me, and I clearly understood that there is no reason to choose. How can you answer to the question, who do you love the most, your mother or your father? Both, and you don’t have to measure it, you don’t have to explain it or compare it.
I know the feeling of my attachment to the US started before I had my son, but it became stronger after he was born. All of a sudden we were creating memories together. His childhood moments were so different from mine, but equally beautiful, and I immersed myself into it.
Mexico/USA! Yes, I own one of each flags, but I don’t display them everywhere I go. It is my belief that you mostly carry those feelings within your heart. When I lived in Mexico, I don’t remember ever displaying the Mexican flag other than at appropriate ceremonies and at institutions, and in a very respectful manner. These beautiful countries mean and represent much more than their politics and their unfortunate situations. They represent the smells, the laughs, their beautiful scenery and their natural resources. These countries are the people who don’t make the headlines, but instead keep a low profile and spend their time raising a family and working hard.
So, let the eagle continue to devour the serpent and ask for divine power for that eagle to wide spread its wings. And let the stars shine brighter and us not be blinded by the glow, but instead hold on to some of that light. There is plenty love, space and time for everything and everybody.
Copyright © Aurora Garcia. All rights reserved.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Aurora Garcia is a nonfiction writer and essayist who was born in La Piedad, Michoacan, Mexico. She moved to California in 1989, when she was 14 years old. This is about the time when she began writing, but throughout her teen and young adult years she kept her writing to herself for fear of being exposed. Although fluent in English and Spanish she instinctively writes in Spanish, as it is her native language. Aurora lives with her husband and 12 year-old son. She loves life, nature, art, music, and diversity, admiring the contrasts and richness of her homeland culture, as well as the beautiful language that Spanish is. Aurora believes her passion for writing was inherited from her father who wrote songs and poetry.
Aurora Garcia is a nonfiction writer and essayist who was born in La Piedad, Michoacan, Mexico. She moved to California in 1989, when she was 14 years old. This is about the time when she began writing, but throughout her teen and young adult years she kept her writing to herself for fear of being exposed. Although fluent in English and Spanish she instinctively writes in Spanish, as it is her native language. Aurora lives with her husband and 12 year-old son. She loves life, nature, art, music, and diversity, admiring the contrasts and richness of her homeland culture, as well as the beautiful language that Spanish is. Aurora believes her passion for writing was inherited from her father who wrote songs and poetry.
Archive | Author
Aurora Garcia
The House. Death. Dad. Thank You.
The photograph is of the house that I lived in with my father for 8 years. The house itself was originally an outbuilding to a main house but somewhere along the way the property was divided. At some time or another the building was used as an art studio. Before I lived in the house a dear friend of my grandmother’s resided there. Her name was Mildred.
I have vague memories of Mildred. I liked all of my grandmother’s friends so I am sure I must have like Mildred too. Mildred had polio (I believe?) and, in the midst of my parents’ divorce, Mildred passed away. She was sans kin and the house was left to my grandmother who subsequently gave it to my father and me to live in. I was thirteen years old.
What I do vividly remember about Mildred was her things. Mildred was a hoarder and nearly every inch from floor to ceiling was piled with her hoards. She was particulary fond of TV shopping but she never seemed to get around to opening the boxes. When we combed through her things, after her death, many of the boxes were still sealed. All of her wares went into an estate sale and it was quite a site to see those wares spread out and filling a banquet hall.
Fortunately he deeply admired my father. Unfortunately he listened to my father’s warning to never lay a finger on me. Only once did he break my father’s rule.
While my father and his friends were discussing how to rehabilitate our new home the kids entered a room that was to become two bedrooms but still remained one. We went in and for some reason we decided (probably because the house had a touch of a spooky feel) to hold a séance.
My Dad kept my bedroom exactly the same as it was the day I moved out in my late teens. It stayed that way until I cleared my childhood space in November of 2009. I was 37 years old.
I remember when I was teenager and I was going to the bathroom in the ‘garage’ bathroom with one wall missing. There was a spider that emerged but it wasn’t an ordinary spider it was a hairy spider of nightmare proportions.
I screamed to my dad upstairs that he needed to come down immediately.
He remained upstairs and screamed down at me- You need to take care of this yourself.
And I was furious. My dad was my hero. He was my rescuer. Why wasn’t he helping me now?
Copyright © 2010 Diane René Christian. All rights reserved.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Diane René Christian, author of An-Ya and Her Diary, is an award winning short story writer turned novelist. She was raised in Pennsylvania and spent her childhood years playing in the fields of Valley Forge Park. She now resides in the Pacific Northwest with her two daughters. Visit her at http://anyadiary.blogspot.com/
I managed to circumvent the spider beast and I found a broom. I whacked and whacked the broom and the spider alluded me until finally I dealt it a fatal blow.
I swept the beaten spider into a dust pan and plopped it into a Ziploc bag. Even in shrunken death it still seemed sizably frightening.
I put the sealed spider next to the kitchen sink and wrote a note to my Dad.
I did it.
And the next morning I found a written reply from my Dad.
Good for you.
My father was not a verbal man but he always signed his letters to me xoxo- Dad.
xoxo to you Daddy. Thank you. Thank you so much.
Archive | Author
Diane René Christian
Let the Music In
I tore open the unexpected package from my brother and a curled photo dropped into my hand. A slow breath slipped through my lips, when I recognized the teenaged girl whose fragile image I held. The wrinkled collar of a tan shirt framed her sallow face. She looked away from the camera into the void. On the back of the picture, my mother’s handwriting noted, Dawn – 1966 Age 15. I longed to forget this girl. But the mysteries behind her gaze crept into focus like an uninvited song remembering itself.
“High yellow bitch,” high school classmates screamed as they followed me home.
“You ain’t shit,” they yelled. But I already knew it.
“Do somethin’ with that pitiful head!”
We’d moved that year from Des Moines to Pasadena, California. The other girls taunted me for reasons I didn’t understand, and called me names I’d never heard before. As I slunk home with my eyes focused on the sidewalk, the voices stalked me like a pack of feral dogs.
Threats and P.E. were the joyless bookends of my 10th grade existence. And the dismal luck of the draw gave me first period swimming. The water turned my hair to sheep’s wool. I hid it under a brown headscarf until the end of the day. Once home, I headed straight for the bathroom to fight my hair.
“Dawn, what are you doing in there?”
My mother would not leave me alone.
“Nothing.”
“Don’t you have homework?”
“No.”
10th grade was the year I got straight D’s.
So they shipped me off to Upward Bound, an academic summer camp for urban teenagers. We were destined to be the first in our families to make it to a university - that is, if we made it through high school. I lived at Occidental College in Los Angeles, with 49 other red, yellow and brown-skinned misfits. The federal government labeled us “high potential low achievers.” It was a kinder description than what I heard from my parents.
At Upward Bound, we spent our days in class, learning how to learn. We spent our evenings on field trips, learning how to live. One such journey introduced me to the ballet. When we stepped off our school bus at the Hollywood Bowl, the scent of night-blooming jasmine hung on the cool California air. The summer sky had not yet fully blackened. We marched, in too-tight shoes, to seats so far back that I couldn’t tell there were swans in Swan Lake. Miniature figures clad in bright colors leapt and flew and spun across the stage. Tchaikovsky seduced me. My tentative spirit unfolded to accept his embrace. At first I squinted to see the dance—then closed my eyes to imagine.
Worlds outside and inside me unfolded that summer. I released the breath I’d been holding all year.
Teachers introduced me to culture, but girlfriends introduced me to “cool.” They taught me the power of black eyeliner. They helped me cough my way through my first cigarette. I learned - if a boy smiled at me - to look at him sideways, scowl, and walk away—slowly.
On the afternoon of our first chaperoned party, we gathered in our lounge to trade clothes and do hair. We tossed skirts and dresses across the couches. Bottles, jars and shoes littered the floor. The room smelled of nail polish and perfumed lotions.
A dark-skinned junior from Jefferson High School turned my damaged “do” into a proud and towering Afro. I sat on the floor between her legs while her fingers danced across my head. When her knees pressed against my shoulders and her hands tug at my hair, the acerbic voices of the past year receded.
Conversation filled the room like soul music on a pricey stereo. Citified soprano sassiness played against the low slow rhythm of country drawl.
“You tender headed?”
“Gi-i-r-r-l-l that is so cute on you.”
“M-m-m, that boy is fi-i-i-ne.”
And then they taught me how to dance. On the radio Martha and the Vandellas wailed, "Nowhere to run to Baby, nowhere to hide," and everybody jumped up. With rollers in my hair and boys in my head, I stepped steps I never stepped before. The high yellow bitch disappeared. The feral dogs retreated
At the party that night, when Stevie Wonder sang I Was Made to Love Her, a short, skinny boy took me by the hand. He strutted onto the dance floor and I trailed behind him. When he turned to face me, the music told my body what to do. The borrowed dress swayed around my legs and I forgot to be afraid.
Decades later, I taped the photo to the frig and traced the sad, pre-Upward Bound cheek with my fingertip. The dancers-actors-writers I became whispered thank you—for those first brave steps that let the music in. I glimpsed my reflection in the glass cabinet door - the face lit by fiery crystal earrings and a scarlet blouse. Stevie Wonder played in my head and a molten rhythm oozed through my hips. I danced through the rest of my day.
First published in Skirt! Magazine. © Dawn Downey. All rights reserved.
Dawn Downey is the author of “Stumbling Toward the Buddha, Tripping Over my Principles on the Road to Transformation.” www.dawndowney.com
Archive | Author
Dawn Downey
Weeping Women
By Rain
Prud'homme-Cranford
When we weep
Mothers cry with us.
When we weep
Grandmothers pat their eyes.
Bits of blood and spit,
Dried salt and amniotic fluid
Make tears falling briefly,
Before we push them away--
As all weeping women before us.
Gathering strength from toes
Rooted in soil memories
And arms strong with
Carrying baskets
Of babies.
Carrying baskets
Of culture.
Weeping women cling
To the edge of dream
Crying for their lost children,
Crying for their husbands.
With sobs too deep and full
Of histories of biting back moans
That their tears fall as silent as death.
Against the rough periphery of memory
The whimper of ladies’ lamentations
Carve tributaries of grief inherent
In blood, from the fishing towns of
The Mississippi river to the
Buffalo plains of Saskatchewan.
Separated by geography.
United by blood.
They sing songs of sorrow
Into our unconscious actions---
Laced with brittle
Hope,
Survival,
Unstoppable Grace.
Copyright © Rain Prud'homme-Cranford. All rights reserved.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Rain Prud'homme-Cranford is a poet, academic, musician and spoken word artist. Currently she is a Sutton Fellowship Doctoral student in English at the University of Oklahoma. She is the author of Smoked Mullet Cornbread Crawdad Memory, winner of the Native Writers' Circle of the Americas First Book Award, Poetry. Her work has appeared in various journals including Ahani: Indigenous American Poetry and American Indian Culture and Research Journal. Rain’s critical work focuses on (re)inserting Mvskogean and Creole Indigeneity into Southern Literary experience.
When we weep
Mothers cry with us.
When we weep
Grandmothers pat their eyes.
Bits of blood and spit,
Dried salt and amniotic fluid
Make tears falling briefly,
Before we push them away--
As all weeping women before us.
Gathering strength from toes
Rooted in soil memories
And arms strong with
Carrying baskets
Of babies.
Carrying baskets
Of culture.
Weeping women cling
To the edge of dream
Crying for their lost children,
Crying for their husbands.
With sobs too deep and full
Of histories of biting back moans
That their tears fall as silent as death.
Against the rough periphery of memory
The whimper of ladies’ lamentations
Carve tributaries of grief inherent
In blood, from the fishing towns of
The Mississippi river to the
Buffalo plains of Saskatchewan.
Separated by geography.
United by blood.
They sing songs of sorrow
Into our unconscious actions---
Laced with brittle
Hope,
Survival,
Unstoppable Grace.
Copyright © Rain Prud'homme-Cranford. All rights reserved.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Rain Prud'homme-Cranford is a poet, academic, musician and spoken word artist. Currently she is a Sutton Fellowship Doctoral student in English at the University of Oklahoma. She is the author of Smoked Mullet Cornbread Crawdad Memory, winner of the Native Writers' Circle of the Americas First Book Award, Poetry. Her work has appeared in various journals including Ahani: Indigenous American Poetry and American Indian Culture and Research Journal. Rain’s critical work focuses on (re)inserting Mvskogean and Creole Indigeneity into Southern Literary experience.
Archive | Author
Rain Prud'homme-Cranford
Hunted
By Kim Shuck
This morning is an ambush predator
Begins late with
Sirens and alarms that spin over the
Hills there is damp the
City raccoons bumble deceptively and
Dangerously on the
Porch kitten and I both with
Lifted hackles take some comfort in hot oats
Strawberries and sweetgrass
Smoke tufted slippers the rising
Hum of central heating kitten
Captures a brace of packing peanuts and
Gradually we subdue this hour together the dark
Lifts streetlights will blink their firefly impulse
Draining even now even
Now the armament of experienced
Early browsers makes smooth this edged thing this
Day curled against the core of vicious
Financial institution highwaymen and fear led
Pathologies of greed
Copyright © Kim Shuck. All rights reserved.
This morning is an ambush predator
Begins late with
Sirens and alarms that spin over the
Hills there is damp the
City raccoons bumble deceptively and
Dangerously on the
Porch kitten and I both with
Lifted hackles take some comfort in hot oats
Strawberries and sweetgrass
Smoke tufted slippers the rising
Hum of central heating kitten
Captures a brace of packing peanuts and
Gradually we subdue this hour together the dark
Lifts streetlights will blink their firefly impulse
Draining even now even
Now the armament of experienced
Early browsers makes smooth this edged thing this
Day curled against the core of vicious
Financial institution highwaymen and fear led
Pathologies of greed
Copyright © Kim Shuck. All rights reserved.
ABOUT
THE AUTHOR:
Kim Shuck is a writer, visual artist, curator, frustrated mom and recovering sarcastic. She holds an MFA in Fine Arts from San Francisco State University. Her first solo book of poetry, Smuggling Cherokee, was published by Greenfield Review press in 2005 and won the Diane Decorah Award from the Native Writers Circle of the Americas. Recent work has been included in the anthologies New Poets of the American West and I Was Indian. In June 2010 Kim had a month long co-residency at the de Young Museum in San Francisco. Visit her on the web at www.kimshuck.com
Kim Shuck is a writer, visual artist, curator, frustrated mom and recovering sarcastic. She holds an MFA in Fine Arts from San Francisco State University. Her first solo book of poetry, Smuggling Cherokee, was published by Greenfield Review press in 2005 and won the Diane Decorah Award from the Native Writers Circle of the Americas. Recent work has been included in the anthologies New Poets of the American West and I Was Indian. In June 2010 Kim had a month long co-residency at the de Young Museum in San Francisco. Visit her on the web at www.kimshuck.com
Archive | Author
Kim Shuck
Altar of Unknown
By Lisa Marie Rollins
I have two rituals before I unpack the first box to set up in a
new house. I start at my front door, light a stick of sage, walk around from
front to back door, to front again. I walk each room, speak aloud to my new
home, speak words to what kind of life I want to live in my new space. I walk
every corner, closet, doorway, bathroom until my space is filled with the sweet
smell of cleansing sage. After the sage, I choose where I will build my house
altar. My altar hosts photo images of my ancestors, glass jars or bottles
filled with water from beaches and rivers I have visited, and colored stones
from walks in the mountains. There is a gourd I found, scrubbed, oiled and
wrapped about its neck a white and copper rosary a friends mother gave me back
in 1994. There is a ceramic and steel crucifix I bought in Mexico when I was 26
and a photo representation of Ile Orisha Oya surrounded by copper and rust
colored fabric.
The ancestors on my altar change. This year as I re-center my
home, clean and dress my altar, I add photos of more of the dead. As I add
these photos, I think about who could appear on it soon, and about those whom I
have never met.
I have never been an adopted person who obsesses about my family
of origin as a child or adolescent. While in many ways, I was isolated from my
family and the community that I grew up in, I dreamt more about running away to
far away ancient lands, and other countries. I lost myself in the myriad of
books I constantly read, or conjured up my own fantastic stories of science
fiction or earth or moon magic to project me away from the circumstances I was
in. I didn’t spend hours upon hours wondering who my birth mother and father
were or what they were doing.
I’m not sure when I started making connections to the absences of
what I held as ideas of mother, father, brother, sister, grandmother or
grandfather in my family of origin, to absences that live in my heart, shadow
my spirit. The experience of something ‘nagging’ or missing is common for me
and for so many of us who have been disconnected from our families of origin
that it seems natural to everyday life. I live with empty spaces where bodies
should be in photos. I travel with ghosts of the unknown. I walk with blanks on
the story of my conception and birth. I reconcile what only lives in my
imagination, the stories I collect from someone who has memory, and the stories
I construct from timelines I make, from other’s memories, stories to tell
myself.
Like many adoptees, there came a day when I sent away for copies of
my adoption paperwork. I remember the day the first round of documents from the
Washington state department of social services came in the mail. It was the
common, brown manila envelope, thick with paper, heavy with implications. I
found it tucked inside my mailbox, I took it inside, placed it in the middle of
the kitchen table and went to turn on the teapot.
While the water started to steam, I opened the envelope, and
examined the sheets, about 40 pages of information I had never read before.
Alongside discoveries I found pages and paragraphs that reveled more secrets,
hiding specific words, names and full sentences blocked out with a big black
marker. Things I am never allowed to know. Information and memory that is lost
forever.
How do I construct my altar when my ancestors are hidden from me?
What blanks will remain when my birth father, who is alive now, but could
become an ancestor very soon, passes on? What stories will they tell me once he
is gone, about how I have his hands, or his chin and what photo will they give
me, if any, to place alongside the other photos of ghosts that I know?
My altar has become a reminder of reconciliation of spirit, and an
acceptance of the unknown. Each time I cleanse it with sage, or dust it off, or
clean it fully, redressing it with fresh flowers, new colors or add new or old
images of found / lost ancestors, it represents more than who has come before
me. Its construction reconciles the absences, faces them as living fears, and
acknowledges them as unknowns. It is a living structural way to heal, way to
grow and be whole and fill the empty spaces.
On my altar lives photos of my ancestors. Photos of those who are
gone in my family like my grandfather Macan on my mother side, my cousin Mandy
who died in a car accident, and of my birth grandfather Arino, whom I never
knew, but whose wrinkled forehead I see in the mirror. A blank card holds space
for ancestors whom I will never know from my families of origin. There are
images I have claimed of my chosen family, a group that includes mentors,
scholars and people who made impacts on my life and whose voices I still hear
in my head when I write, make decisions, or meditate and pray.
This new year, I cleanse my altar again, dusting each trinket,
resetting them into place, I am full of fear my birth father’s family will
continue to keep my body a secret from him. I fear I will remain a ghost in
their photos and he will die before I know him. I fear there will be another
addition to my ancestors, another addition to history of unknowns I must
reconcile. I pray and burn sage, ask for courage to face fear and to dive into
these blanks, into the absences that live in photos with and without me in
them, these unknowns that ground me as much as they unsettle me.
The prayer I give today is a prayer for you, too. Here’s to all of
your and my absences being filled with light, and to the acceptance of the
unknown inside the shadows, my friends.
Copyright © Lisa Marie Rollins. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Lisa Marie Rollins. All rights reserved.
Lisa Marie Rollins is a Black/Filipina writer, playwright and
performer and a leading voice in transracial/ international adoption education
and advocacy. She is one of Colorlines magazine’s “Innovators to Watch” for her
work around reproductive justice / global adoption and race. She is a VONA
alumni in Poetry and recipient of the James Irvine and Zellerbach Foundations
Individual Artist funding for her acclaimed solo play, “Ungrateful Daughter:
One Black Girls story of being adopted into a white family… that aren’t
celebrities”. Her most recent publications can be found in the anthology “Other
Tongues: Mixed-Race Women Speak Out” and her new short chapbook, “Splice”.
You can see more of her work and contact her at
birthproject.wordpress.com
Archive | Author
Lisa Marie Rollins
Cedar Songs, Left Behind
By Linda Boyden
She stayed behind, the mother of my grandfathers,
not by choice, his or hers: theirs.
Singled out, she was, by soldiers
spared, they told her, by yaller hair, blue eyes
spoilt tho' she was, still no kind of fate
for a white woman, this trail
this Removal.
In the guile of their final night,
in the lull of the dark, they slept,
the mother of my grandfathers and her man,
her red earth man
his skin in rich opposition to her pale,
they lay entwined until he woke.
Stirred by the cadence of boot-heel crunch on gravel,
thethick man-scent rising in the air,
whiskeysmokesweatwool
he woke.
My grandfather’s father
crossed to the rough-hewn mantle for his flute,
the smoothed cedar flute,
which under my living fingers
delivers still the songs;
the haunting cedar songs,
gifts left behind by the Tree People
in the branch
he carved so long ago.
The mother of my grandfathers taught her son,
then her grandson, the songs he played that night.
In time, he taught his granddaughter,
child of pale hair and red earth skin.
Told her, too, the story:
Played me awake that night, she said,
with my fingers one by one on his;
played into them the cedar songs, one by one,
until the soldiers came.
As they broke down the door, as they dragged him away,
I faltered once, she said, but did not stop.
I released the cedar songs instead of tears
as they pushed my man from the dawn, from my arms
I played for him the songs,
for the son born after, for the grandson of my old age….
Now as grandmother I tell her words.
I, the girl blessed with Grandmother’s name and hair,
Grandfather’s red earth skin,
I play the sweet cedar songs,
the haunting holy gifts of the trees
he left behind.
First published in The People Who Stayed, Southeastern Indian Writing After Removal 2010, The University of Oklahoma. Also in a self published chapbook, “Cemetery Plots” 2006. Winner 2006 5th Annual Pleasanton Poetry Festival, Adult Poetry.
Copyright © Linda Boyden. All Rights Reserved.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Of mixed-blood Cherokee/Irish and French Canadian ancestries, Linda Boyden has spent most of her adult life leading children to literacy. From 1970-1997, she taught in primary grades, receiving her master’s in Gifted and Talented Education in 1992 from the University of Virginia, Charlottesville. In 1997, Linda decided to change careers and abandoned full-time teaching for full-time writing. Her first picture book, “The Blue Roses”, debuted in 2002. It was the recipient of Lee and Low Books’ first New Voices Award, the 2003 Paterson Prize, Wordcraft Circle of Native American Writers and Storytellers’ Book of the Year, Children’s Literature, 2002-2003, and was included on the prestigious CCBC (Cooperative Children’s Book Center) 2003 Choices list of recommended titles. In 2007 she wrote and illustrated her second picture book, “Powwow’s Coming” published by the University of New Mexico Press. She has also written and illustrated “Giveaways, an ABC of Loanwords from the Americas” published also by the University of New Mexico Press in 2010. In 2011, Giveaways was the recipient of three Finalist Awards from the International Book Awards.
Linda is a member of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators and Wordcraft Circle of Native American Writers and Storytellers. She enjoys doing author visits and storytelling at schools and libraries as well as presenting workshops at writing conferences around the country. Visit her on the web at www.lindaboyden.com
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