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?... Continue reading

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?... Continue reading

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. Continue reading

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... Continue reading

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. Continue reading

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. Continue reading

Dean Rader publishes widely in the fields of poetry, American Indian studies, and visual/popular culture. His debut collection of poems, Works & Days, won the 2010 T. S. Eliot Poetry Prize. His recent collection, Landscape Portrait Figure Form, (Omnidawn Chapbook Series 2014) was named by the Barnes & Noble Review as one of the Best Books of Poetry of the year. In 2016, he won the Common Good Books Prize (judged by Garrison Keillor) and in 2015 was the recipient of the Poetry Society of America’s George Bogin Memorial Award (judged by Stephen Burt). He has also written scholarly books, including Engaged Resistance: Contemporary American Indian Art, Literature, and Film from Alcatraz to the NMAI (University of Texas Press, 2011), which won the Beatrice Medicine Award for Excellence in American Indian Scholarship and Speak to Me Words: Essays on Contemporary American Indian Poetry(University of Arizona Press, 2001, edited with Janice Gould). He is a professor at the University of San Francisco. For more information, visit his website. An Indigenous daughter of the West, CMarie Fuhrman was born in Southwest Colorado and has lived in various rural towns of states all along the Rocky Mountains. She has earned degrees in Exercise Physiology, English and American Indian Studies and is currently an MFA candidate at the University of Idaho where she co-teaches Native Literature and Ethnic Studies classes and is associate poetry editor for Fugue. Cindy’s poetry has been featured in Broadsided Press’s NoDapl compilation, two anthologies, and several literary journals including Cutthroat: A Journal of the Arts, and Taos Journal of International Poetry and Art. She is recipient of the Burns Award for poetry and multiple fellowships. Her current project, The Problem of My Body, focuses on the forced sterilization of Native women. CMarie divides her time between Moscow and McCall, Idaho. In anticipation of Tupelo Press's forthcoming Native Voices anthology, I'm pleased to introduce a conversation with our co-editors about what the book makes possible in the classroom. KMD: You are all both accomplished educators, with positions at such colleges as the University of San Francisco, University of Idaho, and many others. I’d love to hear more about your experiences teaching poetry. What’s missing from contemporary writing programs and the conversations that take place within them? DR: I think there are two answers to your question. One answer involves what gets taught to undergraduates in terms of Indigenous poetry. This includes classes to both English majors and--in some ways more importantly--to non-English majors. For example, at USF we have a very popular class called “Native American Literature and Film” which fulfills the university’s literature core requirement. It is designed for non-English majors and will be, for most students in the class, the only literature class they take in college. Increasingly, there are courses like this all over the country. And they are popular. Professors who teach these classes are often overworked and perhaps even under-prepared--especially for poetry. This anthology will help them teach contemporary Indigenous poetry in an inclusive way... Continue reading

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... Continue reading

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... Continue reading

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... Continue reading

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... Continue reading

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. Continue reading