Dear Chebon
by Chip Livingston
Chipper Boy, I don’t expect this to frighten you none, Chebon, receiving my message like this, as you’ve always been tuned for reception. But write it down, so you remember, and share my words with those who might need them. I’m taking advantage of the holiday prayers and chimney smoke to work a bit of your Paw-Paw’s old Solstice magic to make sure this missive gets through. Obviously you’ll have to clean up my grammar some. I could do all sorts of things with a wrench or hammer, but words, grandson, those are your tools. I took just enough book learning to sign my name away on bills and send you short notes in college.
Away is a funny word to think about, here from the spirit world you might call West of Heaven, but we’re closer than most people think. Your ancestors aren’t just floating around in some far-off place. We’re also there on the earth, watching with you as the creeks freeze and thaw, smiling and laughing mostly at your forgetfulness, reminded of our own fleshly shortcomings. But where we are, we know a wholer sense of empathy. Especially now, grandson, when you’re holding on to worries larger than your heads conceive the world.
You forget, Chebon, some of the things I told you as we walked the land, picking up empty beer cans and gathering pecans. The trash we can recycle, and the task to break the stubborn shells is worth the sweet inside. But just now, you ain’t worrying none about pecans or the 40 cents a pound we got for bags of aluminum. You think the whole world is ending. But only parts of it are ending – and only as you’ve known them, the little what you know of it. We keep learning.
The United States has always been a figment of some white folks’ imagination. Democracy? Tell your Paw-Paw a better one. You took some history from me and some from books, but what you seem to forget is what you stand on stays forever. That land in Alabama, Colorado, Uruguay, and all the rest of it, it’s been here since crawfish brought the mud up and long before the thought of humans. That land will be here long after the memory of us, Chebon. The earth is taking a beating, sure, and tides will rise. But the land itself withstands. As do we, son, but in forms you don’t yet understand but will in time to come.
Time to come, grandson, you’ll also understand that election as a duration every people face and our people in particular have already several times survived. Your blood’s a testament that in a long line of troubling history, it’s nothing you can’t handle. The president of the United States in the year 2018 is not going to be what ends human life. Don’t believe apocalyptic lies. There is no Armageddon. But of course there will be consequences.
Confusion, pain, division. Fear. It won’t always be clear who or what to believe. You sure won’t have to dig up distractions. They’ll be near. But so will the gathering of a new kind of nation. The continent is calling out for its true citizens, restoring the balance of brown people who first emerged upon its mud; it’s telling you the land is almost ready for your occupation. You’re coming out from underground – just like your ancestors. Your volume now is just an ankle rattle but it’s growing toward a hum. Listen for the drums that lead toward syncopation. Syncopation! How’s that for your Paw-Paw’s eighth-grade education! But it’s true, Chebon. Trust me. There’s a song if you listen. That’s a promise. Keep listening until you know the tune. Then write a new verse. Sing that prayer into the world. Direct the chorus.
Chipper Boy, this ain’t a scolding. Sure, I’m prone to coaching but this is also a celebration. You exist. Despite everything they’ve done to us, you exist. With everything they’re doing now to silence and undermine your objections and confidence, Chebon, you exist. As long as you’re alive to witness and protest, you still exist. So don’t get down. Instead get up and shout. Then dance. Don’t forget to stomp and dance. Feel your feet on the loose sand. That’s your freedom.
And what comes after this muddy patch is so much better, more solid, more united in humanity than the planet has yet seen in our living history.
This message is a recognition of you and the Helpers who clamor at the real chaos of earth’s growing pains. It’s an awakening. A celebration of a new awareness. And it’s a great big thank you. We’re grateful, son – Mvto, Chebon – to everyone who’s paying attention. We’re paying attention. All Creation is listening. Make your noise but also remember to quiet down and distinguish the truth from illusion. Keep your chin up. You’re not returning underground but there are times you’ll have to tread water. This is just another one of them. And I taught you how to swim.
But the earth will remain. And we’re not going anywhere. Remember as you walk the land your relatives prepared for you: Prepare the world as best you can for what you’ll leave behind. Life is still a celebration. Trust me, grandson. There’s a reason we don’t have a word for goodbye.
Your Paw-Paw
First published in Radical Hope: Letters of Hope and Dissent in Dangerous Times, Vintage Books.
Copyright © Chip Livingston. All rights reserved.
Chip Livingston is the author of a novel, a collection of essays and stories, and two poetry collections. His writing has appeared on the Academy of American Poets’ and the Poetry Academy’s websites; and in Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, New American Writing, and other journals and anthologies. Chip teaches in the low-rez MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, NM. He lives in Montevideo, Uruguay.
Archive | Author
Chip Livingston
Texas... to Get Horses
“Na he dum—Cheyenne for ‘I’m telling the truth’—is the phrase that lingers after reading Kimberly Wieser's no-holds-barred roaring whirlwind of a collection. This is the poetry of a woman, unabashed and unafraid, speaking from her whole mind and whole heart, emphatically declaring, here is the truth of my history, my people, my family, my body, my sex, my languages, my being, my very spirit. Written with unflinching eyes, this is work without hesitation or doubt, that refuses suffering and victimization, that celebrates survival and memory.”
—ire'ne lara silva, author of Flesh to Bone and Blood Sugar Cantos
Prof. Kimberly Wieser is an Associate Professor of English and an affiliated faculty member with Native American Studies and Environmental Studies at the University of Oklahoma. She serves as Undergraduate Director for the English Department and directs activities at OU for Native Writers Circle of the Americas. She is the author of Back to the Blanket: Recovered Rhetorics and Literacies in American Indian Studies (part of the Recovering Languages and Literacies of the Americas Initiative, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; winner of the Louis Little Coon Oliver First Book Award for Prose 2004) published by the University of Oklahoma Press in 2017. Under her previous name, Kimberly Roppolo, she was one of the co-authors of Reasoning Together: The Native Critics Collective (Oklahoma, 2008), named one of the most important books in her field in the first decade of the twenty-first century by NAISA. Her poetry collection Texas . . . to Get Horses was published by That Painted Horse Press in 2018.
Archive | Author
Kimberly G. Wieser
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
Archive | Author
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
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
Archive | Author
Jenny L. Davis
#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
Archive | Author
Wang Ping
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
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
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?
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!
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
BY
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
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.
Archive | Author
Alice Rose Crow Maar’aq
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
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
Archive | Author
César Love
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
River, Blood, And Corn Literary Journal: A Community of Voices
Copyright © 2010-2024. Individual writers and photographers retain all rights to their work, unless they have other agreements with previous publishers.We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.
If stories come to you, care for them. And learn to give them away where they are needed. Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive.—Barry Lopez, in Crow and Weasel