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.”
Genre: Poetry
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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When a bolt of lightning falls in love
with an old woman, sex is reinvented
as the world’s first toaster oven.
When lightning falls in love with a middle-
aged woman, lightning gives
birth to an electric guitar. …
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Poetry
Chronicles on Disappearance; It Is Sad to See a Horse Sleeping; Phantom Limb; & Displaced Distance as a Red Berry
Phantom Limb
after Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Steadfast Tin Soldier”
The truth is, let’s say, that the tin soldier did not fall in love
with the paper-doll ballerina. He fell in love with his missing limb.
Let’s hold …
PREFACE
WhateverWordsworth: Dear Reader is the Poet. The poet is above all a reader. Poetry is nothing more than hysterical citation. A love affair with the bust I’m drawing in college: I’ve made too soft the edges, and my teacher …
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Poetry
Beginner’s Astrology for Anarchist Jurisdictions in a Pandemic; 17 Days (Piano & a Microphone 1983); Sisyphus Says Relax; Nine Twenty-Nine Twenty-Twenty; & My Face in a Jar by the Door
Beginner’s Astrology for Anarchist
Jurisdictions in a Pandemic
They are a nation without sense, there is no discernment in them.
—Deuteronomy 32:28
The stars are further away. The flicker we see from them
been. The pin drops above …
The Black Ugly Duckling
So, in first grade in a school
where I was one in three of Black
kids in the whole goddamn school,
my teacher (let’s call her Mrs. Snow)
decided her class was going to put…
