River, Blood, And Corn Literary Journal

Deer Trails by Kim Shuck

Deer Trails is a strongly elegiac evocation of a San Francisco that lies buried under its contemporary urban landscape, but can still be found peeking through. Native American and native San Franciscan Kim Shuck is the city's seventh poet laureate, and in these poems she celebrates the enduring presence of indigenous San Francisco as a form of resistance to gentrification, urbanization, and the erasure of memory. www.kimshuck.com

Deer Trails San Francisco Poet Laureate Series No. 7 Kim Shuck

Trickster Story

by Jenny L. Davis

I’m going to tell you
a story about why the
Tricksters no longer
talk to each other.
They say long ago
that the animals used
to talk together, just
like people do today.
One day, Rabbit,
Coyote, Raven,
Spider, Buzzard
and Fox all took
seats around
a table together
for the first time
in a long while
eying each other warily.
Finally, Fox cleared
her throat and said,
Thanks for coming—
As you know,
the point of today’s
faculty meeting
is to decide who
among us gets a
merit raise this year.

Trickster Story appears in the Fall 2019 issue of North Dakota Quarterly
© Jenny L. Davis. All rights reserved.

Jenny L. Davis (Chickasaw) is a Two-Spirit/queer Indigenous writer and professor of American Indian Studies and Anthropology. Her creative work has been featured in literary journals including the Santa Ana River Review; Transmotion; Anomaly; Broadsided; and as well as anthologies such as As/Us; Raven Chronicles; and Resist Much/Obey Little: Inaugural Poems to the Resistance.

Author of Talking Indian: Identity and Language Revitalization in the Chickasaw Renaissance uapress.arizona.edu/book/talking-indian

#MyNameIsImmigrant—No. 3

Write
Write this down
My name is Maya Angelou
Daughter of Africa, Voice of America
The KKKs want to send me back
You may shoot me with your words
You may cut me with your eyes
You may kill me with your hatefulness
But still, like air, I’ll rise

Write
Write this down
My name is Ilhan Omar
Daughter of Somalia, Congresswoman of America
The President wants to send me back
You may shoot me with your chant
You may cut me with your lies
You may kill me with your bigotry
But still, like wind, I rise.

Write
Write this down
My name is Ping Wang
Daughter of China, Conscience of America
The President wants to send me back
You may shoot me with your defamations
You may trap me with your fabricated charges
You may kill me with your money and power
But still, in poetry, I speak

In poetry we speak
In poetry we break the cage and sing
Rise
Carrying our ancestors’ dream
We’re the purple of mountain majesties
We’re the waves of amber grain
We’re the wings of America
As we rise
To the halcyon skies

Wang Ping is a poet, writer, photographer, performance and multimedia artist. Her publications have been translated into multiple languages and include poetry, short stories, novels, cultural studies, and children stories. Her multimedia exhibitions address global themes of industrialization, the environment, interdependency, and the people. She is the recipient of numerous awards and is a professor of English at Macalester College and founder of Kinship of Rivers project. www.wangping.com

Broadcasting Beacon

by Alice Rose Crow~Maar’aq

Weaved through North Arlington again

to reach a(nother) long wait.

At a bank of inserted, taxed, maintained

cross-lights on Benson at Lois

—after a Loussac library hold pickup and

early evening Iñupiat oil inletside trail walk—

this gaze follows a named next-next-next-next-hext generation.

A rubbernecking expat bicycler in-training.

Above, on a signifying chicken-type

wire-enclosed footbridge with an accompanying mountain/wolf tooth pattern

—raising up then pointing down—

a butt-ass naked budding Brown woman gestures wildly as she hurries

across and back,

back and across.

A(nother) pacing

pacing

sentinel.

Traffic lights finally try

change.

Too late to veer east?

Swallow.

Follow southeast.

Turn onto Lois then signal

to maneuver across and back. Check west and wait against a pulse of even more gawking passers.

Navigate to reach Benson’s far north fourth/

third lane. Enter a southern side lot

of a gentrifying spec housing stock/customizing home constructor.

Park at the foot of northern steps

where a burdened male stands deciding what to do?

Emerge from a dusty, pollen-strewn aging black Toyota sedan.

From the stairwell base, he asks,

Do you have it handled?

Raise myself toward a fury of (yet) a(nother) ranting woman.

Ask that particular questioning male,

Would you please mind waiting

to make sure I’m ok?

Check both ears where long, patiently heated and shaped swirls of copper exchanged during a Friday evening stroll in Madison seven summers ago swing

swing

are swung.

Unlatch a front door.

Take a maybe-not-really-fading royal blue

—Cabela’s Made in China Gore-Tex—

raincoat from a driver’s seat and ready to begin this climb.

Just past a first landing: a fallen scarecrow.

A tan cashmere-weight

—shiny camel-lined—waistcoat,

a folded then knotted bandana,

sweats, top, undies,

a patterned pair of

crew socks and canvas sneakers,

an almost full thin syringe beside a short stack of bright foil packets

neatly arrayed across a southern side of an upper flight of northern cemented stairs.

Above, a woman’s voice firmly announces,

I never wanted to get married.

I never meant to!

Reach an overpass.

She is striding with remnants of a naked brown woman’s body flowing below a full head of streaky chemically coppered hair.

She

—still she—

advances

as I offer a hand-me-down tax-deducted raincoat.

Are you ok?

Raising her voice she makes her claim:

I’m interrupting her broadcast.

A screed?

Can’t you see I’m BROADCASTING?

Yes, slowly I nod.

Broadcasting.

Where you from?

Are you ok?

NO.

She wants

—I want—

people to look and see

what this city does to People.

She paces, gesturing across a nakedness

that is her own brown

—patchy discolored and scarred—

yet still strong body.

Aarpallruuq:

Look! LOOK!

See? SEE?

They need to SEE WHAT EVE LOOKS LIKE.

HEAR WHAT IS BEING DONE in this place. What they are doing TO PEOPLE HERE.

I AM EVE.

Look! LOOK!

See? SEE?

Still—quiet—slowly I ask, where you from?

Offer the Bishop Attic’d

double zipped ykk raincoat.

Couldn’t there be

—isn't there—

a better way

to solve problems we find here?

How is this helping?

Sweeping my right arm across more imported cars steady streaming east on Benny Benson below, suggest,

people passing can’t hear hollered words

but some will want to try call pole-ees

because they do (not want to) see you

naked like this.

GOOD!

Cops could come take me to jail

to make them all see Eve

even if I have to do it

ONE

ONE.

Cocks then fires a pointer finger trigger.

ONE TWO THREE...

Asserts I’m taken over by evil, letting it—them—inside me.

Asks, why did you let them inside?

Get them out.

OUT!

I pinch a scarred brow and slow shake

my head. No.

More quietly now—

no.

Where you from?

Offer the fading royal blue raincoat.

I would want you to try help

if you saw me naked and

talking like this

but I do see

I can’t really help you

like this

right now.

As I start down those hard steps,

she turns to face me,

drops a knee,

apologizes for forgetting her manners.

I look up to her.

SORRY.

Sorry.

I mistook you for somebody else.

You’re probably married

and in bed by 9 and

don’t know what happens at night.

Girls, kids are sex trafficked...

She tells me her English language name.

I smile. Reply with mine.

Out of respect for X and Y Z she says

I will cover myself.

Good, I say. Thank you.

Quyana.

She steps down,

bending to reach for an outspread coat. Slowly turns each sleeve inside out,

saying something about needing to do it like that because of how it was offered...

a man looking so sad...sad.

The now not-waiting man calls out,

I’m leaving now.

Pausing at a landing, I gesture toward plastic syringe and packets to say, please don’t put that shit in you...

Continue down. Reach a bottom and thank the back of a quickly-walking-away man.

Thank you, sir,

I attempt.

Circle round to drive away past a looking-down man now climbing into a low Audi

with its gleaming overlapping four-ringed symbol of progressive engineering.

At the southbound stoplight on Lois,

I look east to see our latest kinswoman pacing across and back—

raging with nipples bared in a manner of Pauline Opangu.

This time she is inside a sheen of an inside-out sandy coat shielding her scarred still strong aging Brown body.

Aarpagtuq, aarayuli.

Her words are in my ears as she shimmers in an evening sun echo-screaming, How many more Epsteins? Why so many Acostas?

She is—we are—waning and yet still climb above enemies on all sides, all around.

Alice Rose Crow~Maar’aq, was born for and raised on the Kusquqvak in southwest Alaska. She nests in Spenard, a southcentral Alaska westwardly neighborhood near water and take offs and landings. Ali is a momma, granny, lover, ilung, relative, and friend. She completed an Institute of American *Indigenous Arts MFA in Creative Writing under the guidance of Chip Livingston and Elissa Washuta. Her longer works remain underway. In them she explores dynamics of holding steady and moving forward in these times of rapid change and anomie. For whatever it might be worth, Ali is a member of the Orutsararmuit Native Council and is an original ANCSA Calista and Bethel Native Corporation shareholder.

Cesar Love Poetry

Inventory

I am removing items from my refrigerator
Cheeses that wouldn’t save
Vegetables that had hoped for another day
Strange meats forgotten in the attic

There is rancid stuff in jars
There is wilted stuff in baggies
I acknowledge them and say good-bye
In the basement
There is a unique kind of sweet potato
Which was given by a friend
I had forgotten about them both

Donut Shop

most customers order theirs to go
the glazed, the old fashioned, the maple bars
they take them in small white bags
the big orders in pink boxes

there are also patrons who order “for here”
they nest at the counter and at tables beside the window
daydreams floating like buttermilk bars
memories uncurling like cinnamon rolls
amusements twirl
ideas fancy as French twists

flavorsome steam ascends from the coffee pots
dark roast, kona, or hazel
refills on the house

© Cesar 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

Grandma's Invitation

by Julene Waffle

“I can read a newspaper by the moonlight tonight,”

she said, looking out the window above the kitchen sink.

I knew it as a brief invitation,

scratched quickly on air,

to sit and watch the interstitial moments

of deep dusk turned night.

Moon-shadows dripped from tree branches

like honey-glaze on fresh-baked biscuits,

and breezes carried crushed fern and summer tree

musk down the mountain on their backs.

Under wind-tousled hair, we held our breaths

as nocturnal shadows danced and

jumped from tree to tree,

memories of midnight dreams.

Peepers chirruped their love songs;

their lovers answered flirtatiously.

Bats swooped silently for insect supper,

and evening birds tittered and whispered,

buttoning the last vestiges of day to close.

On nights like this, we’d sit on the porch

amidst unfinished chores and stories untold

in thin night dresses and slippers, ready for sleep,

willing witnesses, yet bed and pillow

insufficient temptations.

Together,

we’d sit and listen

in our own silences.

Eyes closed, she’d soak in the damp of

night and heart-whisper her

own love songs and dreams and memories.

Sometimes her lips would curl, flatten, or oh,

forming thoughts on air

but uttering no sound.

Her white hair brushed out and standing on end,

a crown of wisdom or a cloud of doubt,

I didn’t know which.

And me, afraid to listen, afraid to not,

I’d watch her, hoping to learn something,

but I couldn't tell what

except to say I wish I had asked.

Julene Waffle is a mother of three boys and a secondary English Teacher for over 20 years in a small rural upstate New York school. Her love of language was perpetuated at Hartwick College and Binghamton University. Her poetry, speaking to the everyday people of her everyday life, is widely published.