Category: AP30

Myth Bitch

Before we stopped speaking, my mother told me of an all – woman island. My side of the family, she said, her mouth twisting like a sick branch. And the women are witches. I have since dreamed of women with heads of barbed wire. Torso in the bedroom, breasts in the sink. Legs divided between O ʻahu and Maui. Is witch the right word? When I sleep with a new woman, my mother whispers fetus into her fingers and sews my mouth shut. The fetus of a witch becomes a bitch. No daughter of hers will sleep like that. For the self-segmenting woman armed with needle and thread, rhyme is a mnemonic device. Repetition is rope. I will always look like her. Repeat: say nothing, daughter. Repeat: sleep alone, daughter. Daughter the word for stitch her close. When my blood touches her blood it means my mother spits needles. When I dream of women and wire it means I fuck like a woman at war with her body. Where is my rope? I am a witch. Or I am an island. Or am I a love story misinterpreted? Fetus eating with a face to memorize. Mother, I am the myth bitch you dream about.

 

Noʻu Revilla is a queer Native Hawaiian poet, educator, and aloha ʻāina. Her poetry has been featured in Poetry and Literary Hub as well as the Honolulu Museum of Art. Her latest chapbook Permission to Make Digging Sounds was published in Effigies III in 2019, and she has performed throughout Hawaiʻi as well as Canada, Papua New Guinea, and at the headquarters of the United Nations in New York City. This past summer, she taught poetry at Puʻuhuluhulu University while standing to protect Maunakea with her lāhui.

 

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Rolling Lush

Threshed violet spun through flush of rose and lilac, braced
in an innervation of volante tendencies
to be under pecan tree rows and not any alley this could be
any alley half-paved street without overhead
skin that is overhead light that is not stars that could
make clear for me curb or skin I can feel well
enough under my skin but against? Cold
in this dark overheard skin I can butt against.

Noble diode bright!
Titanium love
from a scrapyard is lost,
mended for use
with a box standard as it had never been used
before bright Io
hidden for pattern
submission. Junkyard
left for curb,
firm concrete. Alleyways rescue.
Alleyways rescue.

A tiny black man at the apex of a bright red curtain,
too huge, the folds angling in behind him but high
overhead tragically straight, pinned to a brass rail running
the length of the stage right to left like Japanese
poetry rolling lush

For money! For Science! Silencio, Science!
Succumb! Felt for scrubber and getter
holding electric thoughts in wet nerves
thoughts slipped so long the wires slake
ions’ firm patter as I loose left
to right like a line rolling up
threshed violets
noble
like a line rolling up

Travis Hedge Coke writes a weekly online column, Patricia Highsmash, and is the editor of two volumes of Along the Chaparral and associate editor of Sing: Poetry from the Indigenous Americas. Of mixed descent, their work has appeared courtesy of Gargoyle, beestung, The Comics Cube, China Central Television, University of Arizona Press, and a MySpace TV show with Chris Kattan. They are thankful for animals and plants inside and outside while self-isolating and recently completed a free, online visual album, low fruit.

 

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Funereal Dirge for Silence

i open my mouth and no sound comes out. the sound that is silence comes pouring over my teeth and my tongue past my lips like drool down my chin drizzling the concrete beneath my feet and it is a silence such that has never been heard. in this sound i am regurgitating all the silences i have not inherited through dna or blood memory or teaching scrolls or sexual transmission. the silences i have not inherited choke me, clog my throat with tears that never had a chance to fall but i like that sometimes, i like that. we are learning collectively to tune our eardrums to this silence. rest, rest, rest, rest. a four-on-the-floor beat. a man in a pressed suit comes by and politely tells me to wipe my chin, please, would i please stop vomiting silence all over the floor because i’m scaring the customers. but it’s too late for him, the silence is already past his knees and he’s splashing around in it, his pants getting ruined in the cold wet absence. it’s still coming. five hundred or more years of silences are being ejected from my body, rejected from my body, coming out in my spit and my sweat and my tears and my come. a silent choir comes to attend to my purge. they can hear the four-on-the-floor. they are singing now too. rest, rest, rest, rest. 

 

Kai Minosh Pyle is a Two-Spirit Métis and Bawiting Nishnaabe writer originally from Green Bay, Wisconsin. Currently based in Bde Ota Othunwe (Minneapolis), they are a PhD student researching Anishinaabe Two-Spirit history. Their first poetry chapbook, AANAWI GO, was published monolingually in Ojibwe in January 2020.

 

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Day 7

Disappeared is not good enough
Will it take a generation of Indigenous art dedicated only to this?
Will it take two?
Life sized sister sculptures
For each woman torn from our communities?
The empty cities of us 
What is not made difficult is made illegal
If not marginalized then poisoned
Pulled apart unfinished weaving
You have not only come for our traditional stories
You have come for our future

 

Day 10

Because baby and mother trade cells
The first gift 
Before crayon drawings and
Paper weaving 
Mother is a kind of mythological creature
Micro chimera
Carrying pieces of our missing daughters
Our bodies a private museum of loss

Murdered Missing is a series of 50 poems I wrote to investigate my own feelings about the crushing numbers of Indigenous women who are taken and murdered every year.

 

Some Other Thing

It was always clear that I was 
The thing not like the others
Those days we’d take the bus 
After school
All the way to the park
Sit up on the hill
Your head on my shoulder
And a plague of squirrels
Near the pond 
I tell you now that it was a good trade
A belonging I didn’t want
In exchange for your time 
Which I did
In the next couple of years
The women from that school who came out to me
As though I had any idea
But I had been chosen for sacrifice
So I guess I had the merit badge
In my boots and leather jacket
I guess I made the teacher uncomfortable too
Carrying Adrienne Rich like an amulet I didn’t understand
To a war I wasn’t paying attention to
With people I couldn’t wait to outgrow
People I can’t wait to outgrow
In retrospect
It was a pretty good love story

 

Kim Shuck is the 7^th poet laureate of San Francisco. Shuck is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma through one side of the family and the other has lived in San Francisco for generations. Kim is sole author of 7 books, the latest being a chapbook, Whose Water?  from Mammoth Publications, and Deer Trails from City Lights Foundation Books.

 

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Mixedblood Girls II

Mixedblood girls who date
              white boys are traitors to their race
              cuz “girl don’t you know you’re supposed to up your blood quantum?”

Mixedblood Girls who date
              black guys isolate family
              cuz don’t you know grandma & grandpa spent a lifetime
                            pretndin they “really weren’t them Freedmen folk.”
Keepin’us separated from family. There’s more than one kind of rez.

Mixedblood girls who date
              other mixedblood girls
              learn to keep their faces up,
                            wear their tattoos like shawls of tradition,
                                          & teach other mixedblood girls songs of their grandmothers
              full, throaty, and rich with defiance of being mixedblood girls
who didn’t claim to be anything else.

 

Hard

Trace lines, limbs of black 
ink over shoulder, down deltoid, skirting
left of your spine, to root on hip and buttocks—
a journey my tongue has memorized.

Long slightly callused fingers
grip my wrists, pull hands
away from bulk of belly—
refusing my self-shame in this body.

                So I learn

To love having curves, rolls, 
large breasts, hapullo nia, and lip-slicked lips —
the way my fat cis-fem body cradles
your tall, hard, butch body.

Opening dimpled soft thighs
to rough fingers, firm lips, harsh tongue, 
your silicon that is always hard—
brown eyes always soft.

 

D/_s

I don’t understand
how you want this body—
its all hanging in a language
of dimples, cellulite, stretchmarks.

Perhaps it is a physical 
manifestation of my compliance—
the truth of my submission.

This is the place of letting go.
Your mouth, hands, sex,
hardness to my softness.

Your words break open
make me burn, leak, cry
in want from eyes to thighs.

There is trust in this.
The truth that outside
these doors I am power.
Never giving up control
but here—

I release, from calloused palm
marking across width of my ass,
shock of rings in breasts pulled
until your mouth assuages pain.

That I am a cradle
holding your body—
and you need me

a partner in the choreography
                of our flaws.

 

Of Settlers and Serial Killers

My womb is a barren killing field. 
Take it like Cavalry soldiers took 
our mothers, our grandmothers, 
our great-grandmothers’ uteruses. 
Let it carry testimonies in its lining 
continuing to shed blood tears 
long after removed from the body. 

Have they taught you how to read the way blood 
dries on skin like you would read tea leaves in a cup?

He says, 
“tell me are you blue?” 
When I sing blues turn 
my red skin purple like 
the bruises, the bruises, the bruises 
purple turn black, then blue, and fade 
like a body left to rot in the muck.

Have they taught you how to translate the way bruises
flower on skin like you would interpret lines of code?

Is this why you took our bones, our flesh, 
our DNA, stuffed it in drawers to silence 
the screaming, to muffle the crying, 
the annals of flesh you keep like 
serial killers keeping trophies.

Have they taught you how to read the way tears
fall on skin like you would read tea leaves in a cup?

You sit in nests we have built carrying 
splintered tibias, fractured phalanges, 
sinew that once held our grandfather’s ankles stable, 
lined with our children’s’ hair shorn, cut, 
and the meconium of grandmothers who 
expelled their children in fields they were shackled.

Have they taught you how to translate the structures
of our survival like you would interpret lines of code?

And so, you sit in our nests like 
hungry birds, lips open waiting 
for us to vomit into your mouths’ 
the essence of us turned acidic in bile 
of holding back our tongues — 
that you might have the last bit of nourishment 
we housed in our bellies keeping it camouflaged 
under our diabetic skin. 

Our act of living remains nothing 
but an exhibition for your entertainment.

 

Rain Prud’homme  is aFATtastically queer IndigeNerd who reads too much and drinks too much black tea. Her books include Smoked Mullet Cornbread Crawdad Memory (MEP 2012, as Rain C. Goméz, First Book Award Poetry, Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas), Miscegenation Roundance: Poèmes Historiques (fall 2020 Mongrel Empire Press), and the co-edited collections Louisiana ​Creole ​Peoplehood: ​Tracing ​Post-Contact ​Afro-Indigeneity ​and ​Community (University of Washington, 2021) and Indians, Oil, & Water: Indigenous Ecologies and Literary Resistance (TPHP 2020). Current projects include: Gumbo Stories: Rhetorics and Quantum Relation-Making in Trans-Indigenous South; Epidermal Journal (poetry); and “I oughta know about lonely girls:” Essays on Body, Love, & Place. She is co-Executive Editor of That Painted Horse Press and a professor at the University of Calgary. 

 

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The Breaking

I cannot speak the truth to my mother

I see her hands, they look just like mine
but her voice can break a room in half
can locate and crack each nerve on your heart.

The border between me and my mother
has been growing since I was fourteen.
I came home one day and her tongue
was both more and less conservative.

I do not know what birthed 
this new tongue but it kept 
enough of its old face to still be
my mother.

If she looked for herself in the mirror
would she see me? Worse, if I look
for myself in the mirror will I see her?

Over Mother’s Day lunch we hold stares. 
She says my girl you can be gay you can be Native 
but you cannot belong to both communities.
Whose side are you on? Pick one. 

 

Billie Kearns (aka Billie the Kid) is a K’ai Taile Dené/Nehiyaw poet and storyteller. Born in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, she currently resides in Kingston, Ontario, the traditional territory of the Haudenosaunee and Anishnaabe peoples. Billie holds a Bachelor of Applied Science in Electrical Engineering from Queen’s University and has performed at spoken word events across Turtle Island such as CUPSI and the Canadian Festival of Spoken Word. Billie is currently a director of the Voices of Today youth poetry festival. Her poetry breathes life into narratives as she explores relationships with family, friends, food, and the dynamic nature of dreams. 

 

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T H Y   G I F T S,  F O R   W H I C H   [ I   A M ]   A B O U T   T O   [ D E V O U R ]

Bless me, dearest Father, for the sin
                                                                      I was

born with—how I forget
                                                your face, once

I see your flesh-
                                                tinted photograph:

I am your ghost, a blessing

for the damned—a way out
                                         of your life as soon as

the earth opens up

its mouth to let you
                                in. & inside, to carve this

haunt with brighter air
                                                       you are still

breathing—to stay
                                        this alive: so faint

against the wall
                                                               I shiver

in the warmest of rooms.

I appear as a single finger-
                                         print on the lips

of a god betrayed, to smear away
                               what shame I entered

into you those years
               gone. Stare at me like a house

burning in lavender, Father.
                                       Give me your voice

please—for it is

the only gospel I ever had. & never once 

heard. 
                                              As if this body-

shot & hungered sky was left starred

with countless eyes.

 

Michael Wasson is the author of Swallowed Light (Copper Canyon Press, 2021). A 2019 Ruth Lilly & Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellow and a 2018 NACF National Artist Fellow in Literature, he is from the Nez Perce Reservation in Idaho.

 

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41. Cardiac

But he knew the cause of his malady. —R.
Akutagawa, 41. Sickness

—caution in starting a chainsaw

the buzzing vigor generates an onset
and eases the space between my ears,
as the massive jolt from the metallic
melodic rigor rages from the chainsaw

what my supposing father does not know
is, pulling on the trigger can cause a negative
interaction with his pacemaker

the space between my ears bow upward,
plumping my cheeks and creasing crows
feet, almost in a hopeful snicker

a tiny thought in my head voices its concern,
warns my supposing father, leaving me with
this dismal decision to notify, but contrary
to my supposing father’s heart condition
is

—do I dare warn him not to cut wood?
                            —or should he die trying?

 

50. confined

But to believe in a God, — to believe in a God’s love,
that was impossible. —R. Akutagawa, 50. Captive

many of them went astray, as whispers away from faith
many of them went astray, from faith as a whisper, away

in the exhaust of these whispers, I become the air of arid fall
as it torments my hands of some presence, by some torment
                                                                                                       — God?

here, pacing inside my small square room, in falls’ remains
I persist this empty pace, but the room is small and arid inside

—inside, I am small, and I believe the pace of this arid room
Inside, I astray from the belief of fall whispers and small rooms

belief in them fails in the small space of this whisper
yet, in this whisper they fail and may fall in exhaust
I have paced the floor for so long, I have gotten better at it

but the arid belief in God fails the small spaces of these rooms
but mostly arid whispers pace the presence of small beliefs

—to believe in God, is to believe these small beliefs exists

 

51. Conquest

In this semi-darkness day to day he lived. —R,
Akutagawa, 51. Defeat

—in this determining dark,
inside my condensing state of mind, there is much clarity to consider,
inside my conflicting state of mind, there is much conjecture to clarify

as the sordid lump of flesh drapes over a yellow armchair
I presume the defeat, the control of place, the control of people
I presume the manifest which continues to exist, and I resist
I challenge daily the destiny, which is this darkest hour of being
My state of becoming is this dark American hour

an opinion like all options leave nothing to clarify, even after
a conclusion formed based on incomplete information
by use of force, or by use of this state of mind, this darkness
manifests a destiny left in a gripping palm and blank conjecture

nothing is determined, nothing determines the outcome without
a belief to consider a consideration leaving no belief, and yet
outside the wind blows the dry leaves about
                                                            —the day moves on without me

 

Crisosto Apache, originally from Mescalero, New Mexico (US), on the Mescalero Apache Reservation. He is Mescalero Apache, Chiricahua Apache, and Diné / Navajo. His Diné clans are Salt Clan born for the Towering House Clan. He holds an MFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Crisosto is an Assistant Professor of English at the Rocky Mountain College for Art + Design (RMCAD). He is the Associate Poetry Editor for The Offing Magazine. He also continues his advocacy work for the Native American LGBTQ / ‘two-spirit’ identity.

Crisosto’s debut collection GENESIS (Lost Alphabet) stems from the vestiges of memory and cultural identity of a self-emergence as language, body, and cosmology. Some of the poems in this collection have appeared in Denver Quarterly (Pushcart Nominee), Cream City Review, Plume Anthology, Common Place: The Journal of Early American Life, photographer Christopher Felver’s Tending the Fire. and most recently The Poetry Foundation’s POETRY Magazine June 2018 issue.

 

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“Make things happen!” says L.A.-based artist Kit Thomas. This Mohawk Two-Spirit/Indigiqueer is Wolf Clan from the St. Regis Mohawk Territory of Akwesasne. Kit (she/her/he/him) is an LGBTQ and Mental Health Advocate. This mixed media artist has been honing her painting skills for the last decade and now has a recognizable splatter paint style infused with Native American symbolism.

Kit’s evolution into digital art allows her to introduce other elements of design with social issues into this union. It extends the range of her talent even further as well as encouraging and inspiring healing within LGBTQ and Indigenous communities.

 

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Jenny L. Davis (Chickasaw) is an Indigiqueer/Two-Spirit writer and artist from Oklahoma and an assistant professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her work has most recently been published and Transmotion; Santa Ana River Review; Broadsided; Yellow Medicine Review; As/Us; Raven Chronicles; and Resist Much/Obey Little: Inaugural Poems to the Resistance and exhibited at the Ziibiwing Center of Anishinabe Culture & Lifeways and Minnesota Center for Book Arts.

 

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