Lakota Grammar
I.
This is what the language teaches, waúnspemakhiye:
Do not be ashamed that you misunderstood possessives.
That you were not a thing to be taken and torn, but a verb:
Winyan, “I am a woman.”
Features
Men are coming to take Mom’s bed.
Her quilts and blankets and sheets and throws are covered with cigarette burn holes. I strip the bed and fill four big black garbage bags and cram them in her closet whose door …
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23 February 1996
Outside in the night, a full moon is shining, and in the moon glow, a mockingbird is singing the cadences of all the birdsong it has ever heard. It imitates the raucous jayjay of the blue …
Read MoreI have something to confess right here up front. Tonight I feel utterly at home. You might think we’re in a magnificent wedding cake ballroom full of chandeliers and debutante pretensions. But I spring from a long line of Baptist …
Read MoreBetween 1990 and 1999, eight national OutWrite conferences convened, first in San Francisco, then in Boston, gathering gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer literary luminaries for a weekend celebrating literary culture. Initially, OUT/LOOK, the glossy national gay and lesbian …
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for Diana
The Lost Tree of Ténéré
was the last of a dwindling grove
of acacias that could not adapt
to the changing climate
or to the hungry animals
that traveled upwind
& yet despite or because
Poetry
R U ok?! (8/3/2019); Industrial Sign Language (You at the Textile Museum); You & Louise Bourgeois’s The Fragile; & You Were an Asshole
R U ok?! (8/3/2019)
Checking in. Let me know you’re not anywhere near Cielo Vista Mall, please. Active shooter in the area. Just heard about the shooting in El Paso. You guys all ok? I just read there was …
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Brigadista in Retirement
Every nation teaches itself the myths
of its survival. Fantasy, harnessed,
feeds the impulse to die for la patria,
and then the war is over. In the after-
glow of dizzying celebration, a purpling
sky
[an excerpt from Spectra]
To speak without vulnerability you claimed
impossible
the land’s fragrance its honey its plants
translation I wanted to be back in my language
“back”? /
I wanted to differently be in
another word for being…
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