The Best American Poetry

Poet Spotlight: Adeeba Shahid Talukder [by Kristina Marie Darling]

Adeeba Shahid Talukder is a Pakistani American poet, singer, and translator of Urdu and Persian poetry. She is the author of What Is Not Beautiful (Glass Poetry Press, 2018) and her book Shahr-e-jaanaan: The City of the Beloved, forthcoming through Tupelo Press, is a winner of the Kundiman Poetry Prize. Adeeba holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Michigan and is a Poets House 2017 Emerging Poets Fellow.

Artist’s Statement

As a Pakistani-American and neurodiverse poet, I am, at different times, both included in and excluded from my understanding of Self. My own thoughts elude me, though I have spent many years scrutinizing and pulling at their threads. My work resides in the Urdu poetic tradition but in the English language. My poems are still trying to understand themselves. So naturally, I have received criticism for my poems’ lack of “access.” It is the curse of being “other”— a rejection by those who hold power, but also their impatient curiosity.

To understand the perversity of many readers’ obsession with access, consider predominant Western attitudes towards Eastern countries, then consider, for instance, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, who painted his imaginings of undressed Muslim women in The Turkish Bath (1862). From this dimension, the idea of access is vaguely colonialist and orientalist, where reading a poem becomes an act of conquest, and the intent goes from honest engagement to intellectual domination. When the reader begins to feel themselves deficient in this regard, it becomes a “sour grapes” situation, where the inaccessibility of a poem proves it lesser.

What if we were to interrogate our motives behind reading poetry? To quell the desire for control and humble ourselves before each poem? What if we were to restrain ourselves from “[tying] a poem to a chair with rope/ and [torturing] a confession out of it”?

Subh-e-firaaq:

            Morning of Separation

  

You’re a saint, the mountain carver
told the lonely Shireen. More even
than stone.

He carved for her,
almost

a stream of milk. Then threw
himself off.

Fell, his limbs
with the leaves he clutched.

_______________________________________

Exotica: Three Poems

 

Ambrosia

He is a glass cup                 
in her hands;                                     

she pours
wine, honey, and lime-

light. A thing                   
of beauty;

 

Conquest

he steals

a glance or two,               
begins to stare—

she is the shape
of a woman. His

eyes are steel.
She blushes.

He moves closer,
demands her

secrets.

 

Domination

A cure for lust.

_________________________________________

 

On Beauty

When I was 19, I trembled
to meet men’s eyes.

Scarf, burqa, black
eyeliner. I was more
than Muslim,
more than beautiful,
more than sexual.

They wanted to know
what they could not
see.

~ ~ 

The cruel beloved of Urdu
poetry slays her lovers

with glances, leaves them
to languish, rubbing

their foreheads
in her doorstep’s dust. In this
intricacy is power:

I cannot lift
a suitcase, which means
I will never have to.

~ ~

James once wrote me poems

as Majnoon,
as the nightingale, as the prey.

I was engaged. Together,
we witnessed the snow consume
all of Ann Arbor,

picked it up in fistfuls, tossed
it up in the dark,

watched it fall like a spell.
He vowed to profess Islam,

as long as you know you’re the only god
I’ll ever worship.

~ ~

Poet Spotlight: Jennifer Minniti-Shippey [by Kristina Marie Darling]

Jennifer Minniti- Shippey is the Managing Editor of Poetry International literary magazine, Director of Poetic Youth programs, and a lecturer at San Diego State University. Her most recent collection of poetry, After the Tour, is available now from Calypso Editions, and her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Salamander, Spillway Journal, Cider Press Review, and others. Visit jennyminnitishippey.com for more.

A Process Note

I’m interested in private vocabularies, private languages at work in lyric poems. There is, in the particularity of image, an assertion of individuality: only this speaker could have made the images of this poem; what emotions you draw from the arrangement of images are yours. I’m also fascinated by how pursuing a sound through a poem can add energy, mystery. When a sequence of sounds “makes sense” to me, I’m generally inclined to leave it, even if it creates unlikely connections between images or narrative points. I haven’t thought of this as “difficulty” before, but I can see the ways it asks the reader to be involved in the meaning-making of a poem. I see also how important it is to me to use my own, particular, private language in the writing of these pieces.

 *

Last Days of June 

A whole sun-skinned nation
later and I am on my knees
in the trolley, the trolley south
bound, everything dark and rattling—
June in this country comes
jacarandad and sky-bruised—and me
wailing hallelujah quite
silently, good-bye brave ponies
grazing in the green wind, good-
bye thin socks abandoned
to the soft mercies of rain,
good-bye plastic peonies on the high
heels of happiness.
I am trying, just try
ing to love this again, my life.

 *

Questions for Adam

What is love to you: the walls,
beyond the walls,
the garden, beyond the garden, the alley—

what of the words you made,
that avocado pitted,
that dog wriggling on the carpet,
that poetic form,
shorelines unmourned,
in what bright east heaving ocean you buried
your feet—

wanderer, o wanderer,
you ribless, you gutted, you
black-haired belovéd first,
what of ash stockpiled in the sideroom,
what of our mother dust,
our Juliet balcony, our aloe vera,
bright green walls and our red bookcase—

what is love to your black-penned vision
made in the shape of a god,
or some kind of cloud,
cumulous or nimbus,
what is love to your silence,
click-clack the machines of your dreams,
uncut nails of the Airedale terriers,

string of patio lights hung by your here-now
generosity, what of the garden? What of
what is beyond—

*

Third Tour

there’s waiting, then wait and
how dare you take so long to get here,

air blasted past dust and dusty blinds,
detonation of overripe, out-seasoned

vine-grown tomatoes, so
come through, blown open:

I’ll make tea, pay half the bills,
we’ll census dead birds and marvel

at their eyes still, still
unblinking into us

*

Sig Sauer

she put a gun in my hand   why else would I hold it?   I wanted her   the flags were half-masted   I wanted her so I held it   tell me about your war   I wanted her gun   in my hand, that not-heavy darkness   tell me your war, have you fed it?   here on my knees in the desert   a weightless dark in my hand   on my knees and wailing, a gun   on my knees in the desert   what danger in the market?   on my knees wailing a gun   in the purse, in her hand   what danger   a market   for desire, mark the prices   her hand inside me a gun   her gun inside, my desire   for every desire, a price   put a gun in our hearts   the trigger will pull us   the flags are half masted   we desire our war

*

When my dead meet they hold hands

 

In the land of Linnea                       and     of Sarah

red bougainvillea blossoms

            by whipping wind              are blown

through the heavy oak door.                    

 

The wind blows also through light-bodies.

 

            This one has eyes

                        she speaks

                                    On the left, she has a voice

                                                                        she watches

They crowd me.

 

Breasts press against my elbows           

                        warm palms in my back’s hollow

            a tongue in the dark                                    of my mouth.

 

A jade-green hummingbird in the red arbor,

                                                wings shiver wings in my hair

            they whisper

                                    as they lean              close above me

                                                                                                as they stay.

                     

Why

 

are the straw hats in the middle of the highway?               I shout.

 

Memory replaces nothing, not

                                    brown eyes or blue, not

                                                blonde hair or

bones or skin.

 

to my dead, living

                        to my dead, living jade-green

                                                                        to my living dead, jade-green

Poet Spotlight: Karyna McGlynn [by Kristina Marie Darling]

 

This week, as Guest Author, I will be spotlighting innovative work by women poets in the form of new writing and review-essays.  Today I'm delighted to share a new poem by Karyna McGlynn.  Karyna McGlynn is the author of Hothouse (Sarabande Books 2017), I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl (Sarabande Books 2009), and several chapbooks including The 9-Day Queen Gets Lost on Her Way to the Execution (Willow Springs Editions 2016). Her poems have recently appeared in The Kenyon Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Witness, Georgia Review, New England Review, and The Academy of American Poet’s Poem-A-Day. Karyna is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Christian Brothers University in Memphis. She’s an avid collagist and is currently working on a new book, 50 Things Kate Bush Taught Me About the Multiverse. Happy summer, and enjoy!  

 

 

A New Poem by Karyna McGlynn

HOW TO TALK THE MANIC AWAY

I used to be so mad—I had daggers coming out
of my puffed sleeves. I decorated Easter baskets
with the plastic daisies of my Fury & mounted
them on Playtex-pink three-speeds.
Every bike I ever owned suffered
a spectacular death: hit by a grey Grand Am,
tossed like a stone into the quarry, snatched
through a broken window, found mangled
in a ditch.  I shook my swampy sobs
out of their frames & ironed my playbills
for breakfast. I mounted my miscues
on the walls of a rocket. I covered
my mistakes in neon & called it Art.
I charged people to listen to me scream.
I moved to the desert because I'm supposed to
be capricious like that. Some people said
my hubris would be better in the mouth
of a dinosaur, or as the silhouette of
a disgraced news anchor. In a West Texas bar,
some girl asked if I'd seen the Marfa Lights.
I stood up whiskily on my stool & said,
“Bitch, I AM the Marfa Lights!”

I used to collect lace collars & white gloves
made for the Nervous & the Consumptive.
I stalked old ladies’ estate sales.
Some of still had boxes of seamed stockings
wrapped in tissue paper
& lavender water & bakelite hair combs.
None of this stuff ever fit or endeared me
to others. Imagine going through life
with white cotton seams around
your fingers. Imagine the Whole World
saying, “Don't Touch.” Still, in several
nightdresses I clambered over
a field of sods. There was a desk
in the distance with one light in its
Top Drawer. The night was open to me.
I took out my loudest shears
& cut a hole in the landscape
to make a space for the Silence
I was immediately accused of violating.  
My afterlife was a trial of ill-
fitting hats, spilled sugar & Little Girls
who loved their pet bunnies too much.
So much, they squeezed their lights out,
nestled their bodies in the doll carriage.
What shall I paint for the mourners:
an old schooner marooned in a field
of clover? A corpse that stinks its way
to the Truth? A bottle of warm
poppy milk? A dumbshow? Shall I
keep up appearances even though
I am slowly losing my sawdust
through an open seam? I know:
I should.

Poet Spotlight: Dora Malech [by Kristina Marie Darling]

This week, as Guest Author, I will be spotlighting innovative work by women poets in the form of new writing and review-essays.  Today I'm delighted to share a folio of poems by Dora Malech.  Dora Malech is the author of three books of poetry: Shore Ordered Ocean, published by The Waywiser Press in 2009; Say So, published by the Cleveland State University Poetry Center in 2011; and, most recently, Stet, selected by Susan Stewart for the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets and forthcoming from Princeton University Press in September 2018. Her writing has appeared in numerous publications, including The New Yorker, Poetry, The Best American Poetry, Poetry London, Tin House, Lana Turner, The New England Review, and The Kenyon Review. She is the recipient of awards that include an Amy Clampitt Residency Award from the Amy Clampitt Foundation, a Writer’s Fellowship from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and a Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland, where she is an assistant professor in The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.  Happy summer, and enjoy!  

 

A Folio of Poems by Dora Malech

 

Essay     as yes,

begged off bad beginnings, false starts of a star-sat self, her benched head cartoon bird spun, stunned out a long season. I came to claim I wouldn’t burden you with the trailed-off scrap heap of all the times I tried to explain (plain) already, but even without evidence of wadded paper, snowdrift of not that, it is those attempts that act as apologia, sense in absence, itinerant iterations’ cairns at the crossroads, hobo code in chalk or coal, worlds not long for these words. In other words: in other words, diary’s everyday no entry, inverse relationship between clarity and efficacy. I needed forms that could flail, fail, lists listing back toward their not-so-fresh catalysts, sepsis of afterbirth still lodged in the body, that which once nurtured lingering malignant.The I, just talk: just like that. Same went for the you(s): free on what messy out. I didn’t want to spill it—it meaning guts, etcetera, but mostly guts—because they weren’t all mine to spill, those two tin cans strung from the ends of viscera, the what-we-listen-to and where-we-feel-it, so to speak. In my belly, twisted sum [sic] sine in test. It’s an old story, sure, and came in waves. I left my name at the front desk. I waved. I left. Abbreviation: sin. The take lodged in to speak that leaves us P.S., postscript as remaindered O, sighed apostrophe to what we turn away (from).

Even some years later, when the nurse explained the blood test, I felt the familiar flush as something else made sense. Material released: information that circulates in the bloodstream. To point to the center and say there wasn’t quite right after all. There were bits of the story flowing through me. In fact, the old imperative, echo of act in the sense of what’s done. Is done. What is, in a manner of speaking, riveted to the text? In his anagram notebooks, Saussure said God(s) and named names. Of this, the scholar writes, “Language’s tokens make sense because they cor-respond.” Raise your hand if you’re who here can’t hear the heart.

Under wraps, rapture, sous rature’s insistent autocorrect. The trace createth (archaic ache) Zürn’s “old, dangerous fever,” Mackey’s “exegetic sweat”: open (source, sesame, letter, book). Pen, stain one mouth [and] the mountain opens. Bromine cant: recombinant. The lab in labial, the utter in, well, utter. Late tale: I hold the same old doll as me. Not a simulacrum left that the bad birds haven’t pecked up, antipathetic, now violet night, violent insight. Cite anti-path as no road home, lips lit [to] spill it.

It turns out, it doesn’t matter what we want to want because the spell still (ill saint) outs us, solves for scar in viscera where viscera is crave, cavity-crammed. Still an I, I was trying to write a beginning and an ending at once, using the only words my tongue could touch. Muddle and middle. The writing on the wall was a tunnel under cell-scratched time. Say law [of] always: simultaneous is nauseous limits. They weren’t all mine to spill, and even their spooled length unfurled and measured didn’t feel like all at all. Totality of utterance reduced to trance, to tatter.

Note burden’s sense, too, as refrain, as what we carry singing down the road. Love me little, love me long’s the bindle shouldered by that us that must end anonymous, bound to the stone of a song. With, across, after: referred myself to a different doctor, wielded the old ax in ask, metathetic. Closed eyes and metalept: hung for a moment in the air from where the bridge I burned once was. The best I could do was an embarrassment, crying for do-over blushes reread, reacts in redactions. Or is it that the space was always there, and necessary, not absence but aperture, artery’s foramen, foreman speaking for the jury?

Waved, left: laved weft, crosswise threads of a cloth washed and wrung, hung to dry on an over-under. An old story, spun whole cloth: blue banner shook upstage to make the sea’s surge billow back the act. The sine was swell and sag. The sine was pregnant, pause, pregnant, pause. Called hum [sic], hone [sic], a song sharpened in the singing, then ground to gone. Sic transit authority (see [sic] changes in signage): mind the [God of the] gap[s]. I always forgot the second I in liaison, and the screen scratched its red line ragged below our best in trysts [sic] (something in us) as I tried to make a dance of distance, move on. Something thumb sings of tapping into: the smallest screen’s green flame, time-stamped out but still smoldering, or, hinge-stung, the rise in bruise as blood’s chorus roars out its resistance. It’s not exactly the same seam, but remove or rearrange and the trace remains, asks after, echoes back into and of its origins—

 

_____________

 

I do

            After Meg Ronan

 

Never meant, never meat, never met.
Try a break. Buckle up. Weary query
gut put after all. A last jab, haze, hex.
Beneath the mattress, guns. Stutter.
Stumble, crazy easy. Keep just a fuck,
bequeath the rest. Laws vex, amaze –
all next level parlay. Bet a jester’s last
laugh. Full cuff freeze, luck up a sleeve,
squats, lunges. But we came bulletless.

 

_____________

After Plath: Metaphors I

            [I’m a riddle in nine syllables,]

Stealing a safe view, interstate
still a smooth read, nothing in
mirrors, not need or glint, not even
a least glimmer in the rims of a coupe
so far. An on ramp's best offer is belief,
yes, spell an easy does it and I bite,
finally sing assent, an infinity.
Big rig, add a deep rumble now,
the true coup down the highway.

 

____________

 

After Plath: Metaphors II

            [An elephant, a ponderous house,]

Not to faint at blood, a creeping
up in the syringe, I avert my eyes then
run, or else. I'll feint so at a mind's
view, my unlit corners. My wild
ape meat is a treif menu in a red pen.
I’d eat. I see a starting pistol's first
green shoot, a bean's beginning in
a fêted barrel, a flash and slosh,
swim of a goldfish bowl on the go.

 

______________

 

After Plath: Metaphors IV

            [O red fruit, ivory, fine timbers!]

Aviary, apiary, one warm swarm
and flutter. Bubble tea, puff pastry,
lit fuse, ore. I reel, dine asea.
Greeting card sentiments, honey
dripping into the moss-lined nest
of a loon, wings riled in the offing.
Motor revs, then idles. A magician's
assistant, smiling to be sawed in half,
saying I'll be the one, the one too.

_____________

 

After Plath: Metaphors V

            [This loaf’s big with its yeasty rising.]

A nature documentary. Opening
shot, pan, a narrator’s measured
tone intent on saying stab, storm,
life, flap, ash, bone, tool, till, life,
death. So yes, as I listen, I begin
to believe I’m the whole sorry
shebang, finding my mess the stained
sign of an entire paradigm. I, inverted
flower we call fruit, fig wasp inside.

____________

 

After Plath: Metaphors VII

            [I’m a means, a stage, a cow in calf.]

Mob's all thumbs in the Colosseum,
meat thrown to a dull roar as gears
engage, meat in a trendy blender.
A spy in internal affairs, other shoe
dropping, in me, it's pints of rennet
in a stein, gift pony, baloney sandwich
with a side of live wires, eel's vitals,
fine dust, fine lines—fine. I'm
a gag order to go. Bye. Ate it.

Poet Spotlight: Lisa Olstein [by Kristina Marie Darling]

 

This week, as Guest Author, I will be spotlighting innovative work by women poets in the form of new writing and review-essays.  Today I'm delighted to share a poem by Lisa Olstein.  Lisa Olstein is the author of four poetry collections, most recently, LATE EMPIRE (Copper Canyon Press, 2017). PAIN STUDIES, a book of lyric nonfiction, is forthcoming in 2020. Recipient of a Hayden Carruth Award, Pushcart Prize, Lannan Writing Residency, and Sustainable Arts Foundation Promise Award, she is a member of the poetry faculty for the University of Texas at Austin’s New Writers Project and Michener Center for Writers.  Happy summer, and enjoy!  

 

 

A New Poem by Lisa Olstein

SOFT TARGET

I’d rather not walk through a lightning storm
to see you, but that’s just the weather.
Last night something struck out so suddenly
from deep inside me, arriving it seemed to flee:
a new feeling, a sudden realization, ancient
knowledge forged in the chemical present.
I meant to say soul, soul is where from, once
forged, it fled, bringing its news of another place
but it felt silly to say so. Anyway, a little death
as coyly in literature they say was in play
and outside the darkened room, too, explosions,
but not the good kind. You see what I did there?
By morning, I’d thought it would’ve died down
but it hasn’t: angry alto monks, darkest echoes.
I’m wearing my best boots for the occasion.
Maybe it’s useless to carry this umbrella,
maybe worse. Turbulence becomes you,
becomes me, erases the difference, the distance
by which we measure. I see I’ve played this
all wrong, waiting, rushing, talking, still talking
when silence is the only place we might meet.

Poet Spotlight: Virginia Konchan [by Kristina Marie Darling]

 

This week, as Guest Author, I will be spotlighting innovative work by women poets in the form of new writing and review-essays.  Today I'm delighted to share a folio of poems by Virginia Konchan.  The author of a poetry collection, The End of Spectacle (Carnegie Mellon, 2018), a collection of short stories, Anatomical Gift (Noctuary Press, 2017), and two chapbooks, including That Tree is Mine (dancing girl press, 2018), Virginia Konchan's poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic, Boston Review, and elsewhere.  Happy summer, and enjoy!  

 

 

A Folio of Poems by Virginia Konchan

 

Spring

Out of view, more galaxies.
Out of time, more light. A naturalist
or archeologist can decipher symptoms,
messages engraved in the flesh
of ordinary things. When the engine begins
to purr again, the crowd applauds.
Lord of tissue, lord of hieroglyphs
and a puzzle full of theological quibbles,
it’s prettiness that counts in china dolls. 
Lord of allegory, of hidden meanings,
of radical fissures in the heart of rain,
I have a skeleton underneath my skin, 
I am serious. I careen through the house
like a killer. Lord knows I tried, like a dove,
to mate for life. I failed. It was the trash,
the detritus, I adored. No images but in things.
No things but in images. There could have been
so many versions of us, why this one?
Love will creep where it cannot go,
through the eyes of the dead horse
that burns slower than my hair.
It’s spring—meta chirp, meta chirp,
goes the bird, philosopher’s stone.
It is a conduit between what was,
will be. It is, like everyone, alone.

 

_________

 

Guiding Light

I wasted my life on language
and other soft constructions,
held the clammy hand of death
as if death was the snot-nosed kid
last to be picked for any team
where skill actually matters.
I could be a bride, and was,
was bridled, harnessed, and
groomed. Now I live in, and by,
a burning timetable, abetting
the landfill crisis by buying
ream after ream of paper.
The bright white paper.
The laser paper.
The paper whose opacity
rivals that of God.
I indicate I would like
the dessert menu by pointing to it
with my bony finger.
When it comes, I order a financier.
As The World Turns, I remain still,
Mona Lisa’s resting bitch face
blunted only by my silky curtain of hair.
Throw it all in the cauldron, I don’t care.
People keep mistaking me for a doll
when in fact I am a cyborg,
surrounded by The Young & Restless
snorting coke and drinking corpse revivers
in the General Hospital—downward,
I mean backward, glance of Orpheus
softening my every blow.
My fantasy for this script is simple:
I just want to edit out the boring parts,
the parts where I forgot to scream.
Guiding Light is my real life:
the world around me is the dream.

 

______________________

 

Meridian

I’ve been in this body so long.
My ace in the hole body, my one
bird in two hands body, my rut.
What does it mean to understand?
I count the syllables on my hand. I don
my leisure suit and stroll the boardwalk.
O bituminous coal. O indiscriminate
hulk. My Ikea bookshelf body
is bookended by equine statuettes.
The world is full of tall strangers
and I haven’t seen a face
that loves me for days.
O moon, you are a hangnail.
O moon, your hair’s a fright.
Note bene, this product has been
enlarged to show texture.
The cure’s a subtle realignment
between one’s inner monster
and the line of longitude that scores
the earth. I thought beauty would
save me. No, I really thought
beauty would save me.
I’ve been in this body so long;
I’ve forgotten how to flee.
Objects in the mirror may
be closer than they appear:
they too ache with unknown
want, dumb weight of destiny.

 

_______________

 

Epistemology

The bleeding title has bled like the idea of triumph,
white flag manifesting on the top of a summit or heap,
and the church bells sounding from the home’s interior
are in fact part of a discontinued sitcom, blaring from the TV.
Doubt takes over. What if there is no outside, no other side?
Dread takes over. How can the subject cross the divide?
Descartes curls up into the safety of his stove, while you
tightrope walk the abyss, or go through contortions
to deny it is there. Any way you twist it, the moon is a cop
and you can’t afford a vowel so as to spell it out, carefully:
with all certainty, nothing. Any purported solution
is smoke and mirrors. I am the planet Pluto in a play.
I mime the grief economy. The death economy.
The libidinal economy. There are so many kinds
of poverty, and the body is a kind of forgetting.
There is no magical leap across the chasm.
There is no way to make it disappear, either,
with a flourish of the metaphysical wand.
The sun, in this equation, is a ticking bomb,
and the lawn is a field where a field once was.
My desire is to be your shape, your data, your
blind spot, your moan. Ashes to ashes, art to art,
object to object. Now let us pray. Now let us
differentiate between the knower and the known.

Poet Spotlight: Deborah Miranda [by Kristina Marie Darling]

In anticipation of Tupelo Press’s forthcoming anthology project, Native Voices, I’m pleased to continue a series of posts honoring Indigenous poetry from North America.

But first, I’d like to say a few words about this exciting and necessary anthology. Tupelo Press is eager to celebrate a more complete version of the story we tell—about ourselves, our past, and what is possible in language. In this book, the first of its kind, every poet will present new poems, as well as an original essay, and a selection of resonant work chosen from previous generations of Native artists. Our anthology is intended to embody the dynamic and ongoing conversations that take place in Indigenous poetry through writerly craft across generational, geographic, and stylistic divides.

With that in mind, I'm thrilled to introduce one of our poets, Deborah Miranda.  An enrolled member of the Ohlone-Costanoan Esselen Nation of California, poet Deborah Miranda was born in Los Angeles to an Esselen/Chumash father and a mother of French ancestry. She grew up in Washington State, earning a BS in teaching moderate special-needs children from Wheelock College in 1983 and an MA and PhD in English from the University of Washington. Miranda’s collections of poetry include Raised by Humans (2015); Indian Cartography: Poems (1999), winner of the Diane Decorah Memorial First Book Award from the Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas; and The Zen of La Llorona (2005), nominated for a Lambda Literary Award. Miranda also received the 2000 Writer of the Year Award for Poetry from the Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers. Her mixed-genre collection Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir (2013) won a Gold Medal from the Independent Publisher's Association and the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award, and was shortlisted for the William Saroyan Award.  It is a delight to feature her poem, "Acorn."  Enjoy!  

Acorn

That sound inside you is a sacred sound:
heartbeat of a seed, eager to emerge.

That sound inside you is an urgent sound:
life’s sharp, percussive pulse.

That sound inside you is the future,
rattling a polished brown shell

shaped like a goddess, or a breast.
You are what Jesus meant when he said

the meek shall inherit the Earth. You
are what Hillel had in mind when he said,

this is the whole Torah. You are the secret
that begs to be told, a treasure whispering

find me. You are the fingerprint of the Creator
left behind in soft red clay, hardening in sun.

You are the sleek amulet snug in the palm
of my hand; you are the ripe mother of nations.

From your flesh comes invention of all words
for holiness, sacred, celebration, awe.

Palatsa, little rattle, you hold time in your belly –
round and full and kicking its way into life.

 

For more information about the anthology, our mission, and how you can help, please visit our Kickstarter page.  

Poet Spotlight: Sammie Bordeaux-Seeger [by Kristina Marie Darling]

 

In anticipation of Tupelo Press’s forthcoming anthology project, Native Voices, I’m pleased to continue a series of posts honoring Indigenous poetry from North America.

But first, I’d like to say a few words about this exciting and necessary anthology. Tupelo Press is eager to celebrate a more complete version of the story we tell—about ourselves, our past, and what is possible in language. In this book, the first of its kind, every poet will present new poems, as well as an original essay, and a selection of resonant work chosen from previous generations of Native artists. Our anthology is intended to embody the dynamic and ongoing conversations that take place in Indigenous poetry through writerly craft across generational, geographic, and stylistic divides.

With that in mind, it is an honor and a delight to introduce one of our poets, Sammie Bordeaux-Seeger.  Sammie Bordeaux-Seeger is a Sicangu Lakota from Rosebud, South Dakota. She writes and teaches at Sinte Gleska University on the Rosebud Reservation.  Here is a poem forthcoming in the anthology, entitled "1900."  Enjoy!  

1900

Great grandma as a little girl holds the quilt in which she is buried.
They had only had fabric for dresses and quilts a few years at that point,
only ten years past the ‘Knee.
Little girls knew then any wildness could be punished with bullets,
the way we knew fear of spanking or The Big Owl,
who would come and take us in our sleep
to the top of the water tower, shove us off.
Grandma warned us every night before bed,
The Big Owl is going to come and take your bottles.
And five year old me would come home from Headstart,
make a double batch of chocolate milk for my little brother
in the cheap plastic bottles. Screw on the tops,
put ourselves down for a nap.
In 1900 there was only the breast, the milk,
the dead mother the child slipped next to for suckle.
That sigh.

 

For more information about the anthology, our mission, and how you can help, please visit our Kickstarter page.  

Contributor Spotlight: Ernestine Hayes [by Kristina Marie Darling]

 

In anticipation of Tupelo Press’s forthcoming anthology project, Native Voices, I’m pleased to continue a series of posts honoring Indigenous poetry from North America.

But first, I’d like to say a few words about this exciting and necessary anthology. Tupelo Press is eager to celebrate a more complete version of the story we tell—about ourselves, our past, and what is possible in language. In this book, the first of its kind, every poet will present new poems, as well as an original essay, and a selection of resonant work chosen from previous generations of Native artists. Our anthology is intended to embody the dynamic and ongoing conversations that take place in Indigenous poetry through writerly craft across generational, geographic, and stylistic divides.

It's an honor and a delight to introduce one of our contributors, Ernestine Hayes.  Alaska Writer Laureate and University of Alaska Southeast Associate Professor Ernestine Hayes belongs to the Kaagwaantaan clan of the Tlingit nation. Her first book, Blonde Indian, an Alaska Native Memoir, received an American Book Award and an Honoring Alaska Indigenous Literature (HAIL) Award, was named Native America Calling Book of the Month, and was finalist for the Kiriyama Prize and PEN Nonfiction Award. Blonde Indian was the inaugural selection for Alaska Reads, a program launched by her predecessor, Writer Laureate Frank Soos. Her works have appeared in Studies in American Indian Literature, Yellow Medicine Review, Cambridge History of Western American Literature, and other forums. Her poem “The Spoken Forest” is installed at Totem Bight State Park, and her comments on Indigenous identity are installed in the Alaska State Museum. Her latest book, The Tao of Raven, weaves narratives and reflection in the context of “Raven and the Box of Daylight.”  We're thrilled to feature her hybrid text, "Shapeshifters."  Enjoy!  

 

 

Shapeshifters

My grandmother told me that if I saw myself on the street, I should approach and embrace the familiar shape. Her exact instructions were “Saankalyek’t, walk up and hug yourself.” The beings we might see, she explained, can present themselves in the form of those who see them.

I spent childhood summers at Hawk Inlet on the island whose name is Xootsnoowoo. I explored the forest and the beach while my grandmother and other Tlingit women worked in the cannery increasing the wealth of white man colonizers. On late evenings, shadows crept along the boardwalk between two rows of dark red cabins. Worn-down women unwrapped bandanas that had protected their hair from the raw smell of wealth sucked from the ocean, the smell of profit now headed into the pockets of white men through tins of salmon that should rather have been smoked and dried and baked and boiled on Tlingit fires. Grandmothers and aunties unpinned their now-uncovered waist-length graying hair and sat around kerosene lamps, gossiping and laughing and reminding little girls to stay inside.

Beings could be heard just outside the walls. As soon as someone sensed their nameless movement, the beings began to whisper like willow branches, whimper like dogs that still walked on four legs, grumble like wandering bears beguiled by salmon-soaked scarves. Grandmothers warned little girls that these beings might look like cousins or uncles or even themselves. There would seem no reason to suspect those beings, grandmothers instructed, but anyone who walked away with them might never come back. Anyone who did come back would not come back right away. Anyone who came back would be avoided by their loved ones. Anyone who managed to return would receive from their loved ones no more than a cautious embrace.

All the truths my grandmother declared are as plain as the world.

* * *

The Woman Who Married a Bear

“The Woman Who Married the Bear” is among the ancient stories translated in Haa Shuká, Our Ancestors, Tlingit Oral Narratives, one text in a landmark series edited and translated by Nora Marks Dauenhauer and her husband Richard Dauenhauer. The story tells of a woman who walked away with a being who presented himself to her as a handsome young man. When she came back, after giving birth, after witnessing her husband’s death, after being avoided by her loved ones, she wrapped herself in her husband’s skin and shapeshifted into a bear. Or perhaps she was a bear who had shapeshifted into human form until she covered herself with her real nature. Or perhaps she was both. Bear children slip from their mother’s womb into a pool of damp hot breath and nose themselves toward her leaking nipple, grumbling, whispering, uncaring. They don’t think to ask if they are bear, if they are human, when they will kill, when they will be killed. They suckle. They sleep.

When that woman, that bear woman, wrapped herself in her true nature, she might have raised up, she might have called for her children to follow. Her bear children, she might have called them to follow her into the forest. Eagle, bear, wolf, human: We all share life.

All the truths my grandmother declared are as plain as the world.

* * *

Land otter people

It was once said that land otter people can make themselves look like any thing of beauty. It was once believed that a sharp bite on the hand of a land otter man will reveal his nature. But no one now remembers the sweet taste of his shifted skin – skin that is flavored like blueberry blossoms salted with a vagrant’s tear. And few remain alive who thrill at a suggestion of his whereabouts. Few remain alive who are not fooled by the whisper of a willow branch. He knows he will die when no one is left to embrace him.

He fades

He fades

He walks past

Becomes invisible

He has not prevailed against those merciless gates

He prepares for death

Still longing for the sting of a bitten hand

All the truths my grandmother declared are as plain as the world.

* * *

Nora Dauenhauer begins her widely anthologized poem “How to Make Good Baked Salmon from the River” with these words:

It’s best made in dry-fish camp on a beach by a

Fish stream on sticks over an open fire, or during

Fishing, or during cannery season.

In this case, we’ll make it in the city baked in

An electric oven on a black fry pan.

Next, Dauenhauer instructs readers on the proper way to prepare fresh salmon, presenting images that rise from our place – alder wood, skunk cabbage leaves, ravens, fresh berries – followed by contemporary images that continue the tradition – paper plates, plastic forks, coffee and beer. With elegant craft, Dauenhauer subtly teaches us that traditions are not confined to the past, but are living, breathing, alive. This lesson is true for baking salmon, for telling stories, and for all the beliefs we cautiously embrace.

All the truths my grandmother declared are as plain as the world.

* * *

How to Make Good Baked Salmon from the River

By Nora Dauenhauer

It's best made in dry-fish camp on a beach by a
fish stream on sticks over an open fire, or during
fishing, or during cannery season.

In this case, we'll make it in the city baked in
an electric oven on a black fry pan.

INGREDIENTS
Barbecue sticks of alder wood.
In this case, the oven will do.
Salmon: River salmon, current supermarket cost
$4.99 a pound.
In this case, salmon poached from river.
Seal oil or olachen oil.
In this case, butter or Wesson oil, if available.

DIRECTIONS
To butcher, split head up the jaw. Cut through,
remove gills. Split from throat down the belly.
Gut, but make sure you toss all to the seagulls and
the ravens because they're your kin, and make sure
you speak to them while you're feeding them.
Then split down along the back bone and through
the skin. Enjoy how nice it looks when it's split.

Push stake through flesh and skin like pushing
a needle through cloth, so that it hangs on stakes
while cooking over fire made from alder wood.

Then sit around and watch the slime on the salmon
begin to dry out. Notice how red the flesh is,
and how silvery the skin looks. Watch and listen
to the grease crackle, and smell its delicious
aroma drifting around on a breeze.

Mash some fresh berries to go along for dessert.
Pour seal oil in with a little water. Set aside.

In this case, put the poached salmon in a fry pan.
Smell how good it smells while it's cooking,
because it's soooooooo important.

Cut up an onion. Put in a small dish. Notice how
nice this smells too and how good it will taste.
Cook a pot of rice to go along with salmon. Find
some soy sauce to put on rice, maybe borrow some.

In this case, think about how nice the berries would
have been after the salmon, but open a can of fruit
cocktail instead.

Then go out by the cool stream and get some skunk
cabbage, because it's biodegradable, to serve the
salmon from. Before you take back the skunk cabbage
you can make a cup out of one to drink from the
cool stream.

In this case, plastic forks paper plates and cups will do, and
drink cool water from the faucet.

TO SERVE
After smelling smoke and fish and watching the
cooking, smelling the skunk cabbage and the berries
mixed with seal oil, when the salmon is done, put
the salmon on stakes on the skunk cabbage and pour
some seal oil over it and watch the oil run into
the nice cooked flakey flesh which has now turned
pink.

Shoo mosquitoes off the salmon, and shoo the ravens
away, but don't insult them because the mosquitoes
are known to be the ashes of the cannibal giant,
and Raven is known to take off with just about
anything.

In this case, dish out on paper plates from fry pan.
Serve to all relatives and friends you have invited
to the barbecue and those who love it.

And think how good it is that we have good spirits
that still bring salmon and oil.

TO EAT
Everyone knows that you can eat just about every
part of the salmon, so I don't have to tell you
that you start with the head because it's everyone's
favorite. You take it apart bone by bone, but make
sure you don't miss the eyes, the cheeks, the nose,
and the very best part–the jawbone.

You start on the mandible with a glottalized
alveolar fricative action as expressed in the Tlingit

verb als'oos'.

Chew on the tasty, crispy skins before you start
on the bones. Eeeeeeeeeeeee!! How delicious.

Then you start on the body by sucking on the fins
with the same action. Include crispy skins, then
the meat with grease dripping all over it.

Have some cool water from the stream with the salmon.

In this case, water from the faucet will do.
Enjoy how the water tastes sweeter with salmon.

When done, toss the bones to the ravens and
seagulls and mosquitoes, but don't throw them in
the salmon stream because the salmon have spirits
and don't like to see the remains of their kin
among them in the stream.

In this case, put bones in plastic bag to put
in dumpster.

Now settle back to a story telling session, while
someone feeds the fire.

In this case, small talk and jokes with friends
will do while you drink beer. If you shouldn't
drink beer, tea or coffee will do nicely.

Gunalcheesh for coming to my barbecue.

* * *

The Spoken Forest

Brown bear dances in the dark in the dark forest in the night to the remembered melody of a happy song his mother once heard her grandmother hum—the nearly lost memory of a song meant for this time of the night, to take away our grief, to help us laugh again, to set the bear surely to spin beneath the darkly spinning stars.

He knows winter when he sees it when he smells snow making the air fat with promises of sleep he knows he can eat fat that will burn his fires in the night in the dark night and warm his cave of dreams where his breath steams the air that carries our unforgotten songs our unremembered dances our unsaved prayers.

Spruce and hemlock whisper one to another. Our history our histories our story our stories our memory our memories our life our lives who we are what we are how we are where we are spruce and hemlock watch as we hurry to places with no sun no rain no humans they tenderly fold us into their whispers knowing that in the next days in the next generations in the next worlds our stories will be the at.oow they bring out to display to us their opposites when they host memorials for our impeccable purpose.

Land otter man uses his cell phone on the bus

When I look at him I know: This kooshdakaa has wrapped himself as human.

Human, yes. But … different in some way. Different in some ways. In the way his black hair lies flat straight back from his flat wide forehead. In his strict posture, his barrel chest. His always-shined shoes. His surprising, high voice. In the way his lip remembers the adornments his grandmothers wore when they were still those innocent girls before dleitkaa came to tell them they were dirty.

 

The Spoken Forest

I was thinking about the forest one day
and it came to me—
our stories,
our songs,
our names,
our history,
our memories
are not lost.

All these riches are being kept for us
by our aunties, our uncles,
our grandparents, our relatives—
those namesakes who walk and dance
wearing robes that make them seem like bears
and wolves.

Our loved ones.
Those beings who live in the spoken forest.
They are holding everything for us.
All the truths my grandmother declared are as plain as the world.

 

Portions of "The Spoken Forest" have appeared in Tidal Echoes and Poems in Place Alaska.

"How to Make Good Baked Salmon from the River" appears in Nora Dauenhauer's book The Droning Shaman.

 

For more information about our mission, and how you can help, please visit our Kickstarter page.  

Contributor Spotlight: An Interview with Ishmael Angaluuk Hope

 

In anticipation of Tupelo Press’s forthcoming anthology project, Native Voices, I’m pleased to continue a series of posts honoring Indigenous poetry from North America.

But first, I’d like to say a few words about this exciting and necessary anthology. Tupelo Press is eager to celebrate a more complete version of the story we tell—about ourselves, our past, and what is possible in language. In this book, the first of its kind, every poet will present new poems, as well as an original essay, and a selection of resonant work chosen from previous generations of Native artists. Our anthology is intended to embody the dynamic and ongoing conversations that take place in Indigenous poetry through writerly craft across generational, geographic, and stylistic divides.

I recently had a chance to interview one of our contributors, Ishmael Angaluuk Hope, about his poem, "Canoe Launching into the Gaslit Sea," featured in a previous Best American Poetry post, and forthcoming in the anthology.  Ishmael Angaluuk Hope is a Tlingit and Inupiaq storyteller, poet and scholar who lives in Juneau, Alaska. Notable projects includes serving as the lead writer for Kisima Ingitchuna: Never Alone for E-Line Media and the Cook Inlet Tribal Council; and publishing two poetry books under the Ishmael Reed Publishing Company, Courtesans of Flounder Hill and Rock Piles Along the Eddy. He is raising a family of five children with his wife, Lily Hope, a Tlingit weaver.  

 

A Conversation With Ishmael Angaluuk Hope

KMD:  Tell us about your first encounter with poetry.  

IAH:  Both of my parents, the late Elizabeth “Sister” Goodwin Hope, Taliiraq, an Iñupiaq who grew up in Kotzebue, Alaska, and Andrew Hope III, Xhaastánch, a Tlingit born and raised in Sitka, Alaska, were poets. Boy, do I sure miss them. My mother’s book of poems, A Lagoon Is In My Backyard, was, as far as her and her publisher–Ishmael Reed Publishing Company–knew, the first published book of poems by an Inuit, in 1984. Now there are incredible Iñupiaq poets like Joan Kane and dg okpik, among many, to which I have joined ranks with my two books, Courtesans of Flounder Hill and Rock Piles Along the Eddy, by the same publisher of my mother’s book. Ishmael Reed and his wife Carla Blank have been family friends for many decades, and tremendous supporters of my parents’ and my work, along with countless others. So I grew up around it. It was weird growing up in a community where anti-Nativeness was very strong, yet my parents were these respected poets and cultural leaders. I think more than anything the resonance of humanity my parents brought to me, the warmth and love, and joy of creation, led me to poetry.

KMD:  Your poem, “Canoe Launching into the Gaslit Sea” reads as a gorgeously rendered imperative, a call to action. In what ways is the practice of poetry political for you as a writer?  

IAH:  Thanks much for your kind comment. I think we need a very expansive idea of what poetry is, and to be very careful about teaching it in a non-prescriptive, non-proscriptive way. The way I experience poetry is through resonances, vibrations the words carry, which could reflect–yet is not summed up in totality–sound, image, breath, motion, body, atmosphere, and even direct ideas. Though the term I feel is at risk of being overused or misused, I believe very much in bearing witness. So my poems can be quite political in that sense, though I try to stay out of the dichotomous political spectrum that dominates political discourse. I do believe–and more importantly, I have observed–that old Indigenous lifeways can be tremendously healing and can teach people how to truly live in this land. My writing sometimes reflects that insight, but I don’t try to overthink it when I write.

KMD:  Your poem also explores - with wit, lyricism and grace - the complexities and contradictions inherent in the idea of community. “We need to band together…” the speaker tells us, “scatter as one.” In what ways does the practice of poetry cultivate a more mindful community?  

IAH:  Robert Bringhurst had a fine rendering of insight in the spirit of the monk poet Han Shan. At the poem’s end, entitled “Han Shan”, Bringhurst writes,

            I am leaving now. Please,

            no applause. Those who know how to live

            will leave with me

            in different directions.

I think I was influenced by that poem with “scatter as one”, though I made it my own. What I try to do is locate meanings, which I feel in my body, and then to write when I feel it resonating. In this case, the community has its own rich spectrum of needs, griefs and joys, and I was meditating on it when writing. I first wrote it to be read aloud at the Indigenous Comic Con in Albuquerque in 2016, run by Lee Francis and his wonderful colleagues. It was a great time, a time for me to support the likes of brilliant Native game developers Elizabeth LaPensée, Allen Turner and Renee Nejo. It was awkward to read it at the panel, to be totally honest, because non-poetry panels are not really set up for that, but they were who I wrote it for and so I am grateful the audience allowed for it.

Poetry, in the broadest sense possible, which to me is something like deep and intense thought, and thought which extends beyond the human world, can remind us of the invisible yet tangible tapestry that connects us. Regarding my sense of poetry, I trace my lineage to the likes of Robert Bringhurst, who wrote that “Poetry, like science, is a way of finding out–by stating perceptively and clearly–what exists and what is going on”; and the great Yup’ik scholar Angayuqaq Oscar Kawagley, who offered profound insights on Native ways of knowing. Nature makes the most enduring poetry, I feel, because it’s ever-renewing and luminous if left to its own devices. So I think there is something to connecting with the resonances of poetry, which can connect us to other resonances, such as the living human community, to ancestors, to descendants and to the whole world.

KMD: What poets inspire you?  Who are you currently reading?  

IAH:  Robert Bringhurst, the late Nora Dauenhuaer and the late Richard Dauenahuer are some of my most important mentors. They’ve been tremendously supportive, and their insights and writings are urgent and nourishing to me. I think Federico García Lorca is maybe the greatest poet who ever lived, which of course is uncouth to say with such direct valuation! I read whatever Pablo Neruda I can get my hands on, and I think people can spend years seriously studying his work, rather than being relegated to a sort of high school crush for poets! Joy Harjo is a profound supporter of Native writers, and I deeply admire her work as well. I frequently turn to Avdo Međedović’s The Wedding of Smailagić Meho, one of the world’s great epic poems. Though they are not comfortably recognized as poets, I always go back to the great Native American storytellers: Robert Nasruk Cleveland, Catherine Attla, Paul John, Willie Marks and Robert Zuboff, among many others, and even living Elders such as Sequoyah Guess and George Davis, Kaaxwaan Éesh. Out of some of the ones recently published, I enjoy the work of Joan Kane, Ken White, Sherwin Bitsui, Tiffany Midge and Heid Erdrich.

KMD:  Your work calls our attention the beauty inherent in the quotidian, “the garlic cloves” and “crumbs” of everyday life.  In the poem featured here, you provocatively blur the boundaries between high and low.  With that in mind, what nonliterary texts have been influential for your poetics?  

IAH:  I grew up with comic books. I’ve also recently gotten more into games. I was a narrative designer and script writer for Kisima Ingitchuna: Never Alone, a game co-produced by E-Line Media and Cook Inlet Tribal Council. There’s a tremendous amount of great work being generated by Native comic creators, like Jay Odjick and Arigon Starr, and Native game developers as I mentioned. I also have been getting into standup comedy. Maria Bamford and Todd Barry are golden geniuses. I absolutely love the interplay they do with internal monologue being spoken aloud–linguistically-intact, if that makes sense–with colloquial dialogue and comedic timing.

KMD: What are you currently working on?  What can readers look forward to?

IAH:  My book, Rock Piles Along the Eddy, was just published in March. Also, I’m doing a wild and crazy long poem right now, under the guidance of Ken White, who has been an astute and helpful mentor, at the Institute of American Indian Arts Low Residency Creative Writing MFA program. This may sound weird for some, but I believe that humans have some sense of sonar intelligence, and it’s important with how we interact with the land, though it’s not like we’re dolphins. It is basic and not really mystical to me, our sense of atmosphere and how we orient ourselves in spaces. I think words carry resonances, and I’m listening for the resonances in the land and waterways, along with my deeply-internal psyche, and seeing what I find. The tentative title is Love Letter to the Future: A Book of the Land in Four Acts. I’m not sure when it would be published, because it has just begun, but it feels incredibly freeing and joyful to write, which I think is a good sign.

 

For more information about the anthology, our mission, and how you can help bring this project to life, please visit our Kickstarter page. 

Poet Spotlight: Michael Wasson [by Kristina Marie Darling]

 

In anticipation of Tupelo Press’s forthcoming anthology project, Native Voices, I’m pleased to continue a series of posts honoring Indigenous poetry from North America.

But first, I’d like to say a few words about this exciting and necessary anthology. Tupelo Press is eager to celebrate a more complete version of the story we tell—about ourselves, our past, and what is possible in language. In this book, the first of its kind, every poet will present new poems, as well as an original essay, and a selection of resonant work chosen from previous generations of Native artists. Our anthology is intended to embody the dynamic and ongoing conversations that take place in Indigenous poetry through writerly craft across generational, geographic, and stylistic divides.

With that in mind, I'm thrilled to introduce another one of our talented contributors, Michael Wasson.  Michael is the author of This American Ghost (YesYes Books, 2017). His poems appear in American Poets, Beloit Poetry Journal, Drunken Boat, Gulf Coast, Kenyon Review, Narrative, Poetry Northwest, Best New Poets, and Bettering American Poetry.  He is nimíipuu from the Nez Perce Reservation in Idaho.  I'm pleased to present his poem, "Mourning Ceremony." Enjoy!  

 

Mourning Ceremony

hipe’síweme kaa wáaqo’ ‘ilcwéew’cixnim cilakátki
‘iceyéeyenm wéetesne péetek’ene. They carved and now
Coyote distributed Monster’s body to various lands.

 

When grief is allowed to us it’s in the stern shape and voice of a man
who walks around ‘n yells at us and his hollering holds our faces
while we are handed polaroid photographs and old portraits
and lip-stained cups with either coffee or red Kool-Aid rings inside
and dirty paintings and ashy ashtrays and almost clean enough pots
and iron skillets and washed pans and jean jackets still glazed
with the scent of sweat ‘n armpits and pine-rubbed flannel coats
and pants so dirty when you glide your hand across ‘em dust slips off
and fades into the blaring gymnasium lights
and cracked and bent glasses frames with a little resin of ear oil
and a smear of dried blood still in the screws and plain moccasins
and porcupine quill roaches ranging from child-size to adult-size
worn out shoes and torn boots and a wristwatch an elderly woman
puts to her ear and keeps it there like a phone and a phone
though we don’t have enough money to buy an answering machine
to record your lost breathing soft into some spooled static
and a collection of tapes and your Black Sabbath and Beatles
and Jimi Hendrix and the Eagles and Led Zeppelin and Credence
Clearwater Revival and the blankets you took with you
when you ended up homeless for a little while and slept along
the Clearwater River and baskets with nothing inside them
and door knobs and rugs and your dirty shirt that had Mickey Mouse
adorned in a headdress and more blankets and letters and notes
and he’s yelling at us that this is the only time we get to mourn for you
for this loss and for this collection of your life that we broadcast
across this throbbing I feel up here in these wooden bleachers
and across the sudden loneliness taking ahold of our burning throats
that you need to hear us and that you are never coming back
that we are weak people who are holding your separated body
in our wrecked arms ‘n hands and on our laps ‘n behind our eyes
and we grip onto these monstrous pieces of you until we break
into this ancient song now flooding the air and shaking the overhead lights
burying you beneath this rush of desperate longing
and face your bright and drawn-out vanishing of ‘ilcwéew’cixnim tim’íne
your sáw’is kaa sayaqi’sníx kiké’t núunim ‘ipsúusx pipísne pawic’asc’asnóoya
and sound our tightening ribs so wide even all the long dead ones can hear
each of our gym-lit bodies bursting and wailing and blooming open.

 

Grateful acknowledgments to As/Us, where this poem first appeared.  

 

For more information about our mission, and how you can help, please visit our Kickstarter page.

Poet Spotlight: Karenne Wood [by Kristina Marie Darling]

 

 

In anticipation of Tupelo Press’s forthcoming anthology project, Native Voices, I’m pleased to continue a series of posts honoring Indigenous poetry from North America.

But first, I’d like to say a few words about this exciting and necessary anthology. Tupelo Press is eager to celebrate a more complete version of the story we tell—about ourselves, our past, and what is possible in language. In this book, the first of its kind, every poet will present new poems, as well as an original essay, and a selection of resonant work chosen from previous generations of Native artists. Our anthology is intended to embody the dynamic and ongoing conversations that take place in Indigenous poetry through writerly craft across generational, geographic, and stylistic divides.

With that in mind, it is an honor and a delight to introduce one of our poets, Karenne Wood.  Karenne Wood is an enrolled member of the Monacan Indian Nation who directs Virginia Indian Programs at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. She holds a MFA in poetry and a PhD in linguistic anthropology. She has worked at the National Museum of the American Indian as a researcher and at the Association on American Indian Affairs as a repatriation specialist. In 2015 she was honored as one of Virginia’s Women in History. Karenne is the author of two poetry collections, Markings on Earth (2000) and Weaving the Boundary, (2016). Her poems have appeared in such journals as The Kenyon Review, Orion, and Shenandoah.  

Here is one of her contributions to the anthology project, "Deer Woman."  Enjoy!  

 

 

Deer Woman

He hunted me into the clouds as I sought the blue
star-petaled flower, its scent like magnolia and peach.
I left my family in the meadow to pick my steps
Across patched snow, where fields grasped edges of sky.

There is within some of us a longing to be stripped clean.

Alongside, the forest held his shape. His scent rose to me
with the wind. Too late I knew him, too late to find cover,
and I ran as I was made to—haunches taut, nostrils steaming,
like a swallow I darted into glistening whiteness.

When I tired, he was there. His circle tightened.
Dark, and dark-eyed, hypnotic—I could feel his hunger
as my own. I had taunted his dreams more than once,
dreamt that mouth, the merciless craving in him.

There is within some of us a longing to be stripped clean,

To give it all—strings of sinew, tufted hair, marrow,
white ropes of fat, to bare the body’s pulse. I froze,
heavy with the need to dissolve into him, his mouth
the deep red song of an appeasable desire.

On the wind, I hear another song, my family calling out
to me, calling me into my name. But I cannot return
from this altitude, bound to his hunger, which is a kind
of love. I will kneel in a cloud’s wisp of grace, to discover

how completely our own wanting wounds us.

 

Published in Weaving the Boundary, University of Arizona Press.   Grateful acknowledgements as well to Shenandoah, where this poem first appeared. 

 

For more information about our anthology project, and how you can help bring this book to life, please visit our Kickstarter page.   

Poet Spotlight: Ishmael Hope [by Kristina Marie Darling]

 

In anticipation of Tupelo Press’s forthcoming anthology project, Native Voices, I’m pleased to announce a series of posts honoring Indigenous poetry from North America.

But first, I’d like to say a few words about this exciting and necessary anthology. Tupelo Press is eager to celebrate a more complete version of the story we tell—about ourselves, our past, and what is possible in language. In this book, the first of its kind, every poet will present new poems, as well as an original essay, and a selection of resonant work chosen from previous generations of Native artists. Our anthology is intended to embody the dynamic and ongoing conversations that take place in Indigenous poetry through writerly craft across generational, geographic, and stylistic divides.

With that in mind, it is an honor and a delight to introduce one of our poets, Ishmael Hope, with a piece entitled “Canoe Launching into the Gaslit Sea”….

 

“Canoe Launching into the Gaslit Sea” 

Now, as much as ever, and as always,
we need to band together, form
a lost tribe, scatter as one, burst
through rifle barrels guided
by the spider’s crosshairs. We need
to knit wool sweaters for our brother
sleeping under the freeway,
hand him our wallets and bathe
his feet in holy water. We need
to find our lost sister, last seen
hitchhiking Highway 16
or panhandling on the streets of Anchorage,
couchsurfing with relatives in Victoria,
or kicking out her boyfriend
after a week of partying
in a trailer park in Salem, Oregon.

Now, as much as ever, and as always,
we need to register together,
lock arms at the front lines, brand
ourselves with mutant DNA strands,
atomic whirls and serial numbers
adding ourselves to the blacklist.
We need to speak in code, languages
the enemy can’t break, slingshot
garlic cloves and tortilla crumbs,
wear armor of lily pads and sandstone
carved into the stately faces of bears
and the faraway look of whitetail deer.
We need to run uphill with rickshaws,
play frisbee with trash lids, hold up
portraits of soldiers who never
made it home, organize a peace-in
on the walls of the Grand Canyon.
We need to stage earnest satirical plays,
hold debate contests with farm animals
at midnight, fall asleep on hammocks
hanging from busy traffic lights.

Now, as much as ever, and as always,
we need to prank call our senators,
take selfies with the authorities
at fundraisers we weren’t invited to,
kneel in prayer at burial grounds
crumbling under dynamite.
We need to rub salve on the belly
of our hearts, meditate on fault lines
as the earth quakes, dance in robes
with fringe that spits medicine, make
love on the eve of the disaster. 

 

For more information about our mission, and how you can help, please check back for information about our fundraiser, which will be available in the coming days.