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Words Like Love (audio book)

by Tanaya Winder

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1.
Saint Francis saw me crying outside of a bookstore near the entrance. I wouldn’t have noticed if it hadn’t been for him tapping my shoulder proclaiming, “This place isn’t big enough” before he sideways stepped through the opened glass door spilling out Nina Simone’s blackbird voice why you wanna fly. Signs. I’d always believed in them. Grounded for years after Angel took his leap and fell unintentionally clipping my wings. I might’ve leapt then if Francis hadn’t returned with paper and a pen to sit beside me. So I asked, “Francis, what do we do with the lonely?” And he sang, “The same thing you do with pain” Our eyes are endless wells big enough for holding every fallen star’s light. And I started to write all the tears I had already cried, wondering: is it possible for any of us to ever love, again?
2.
in my mother’s womb i. i came into this world incomplete, born with a hole in my heart. it happened in my mother’s womb. doctors have a name for it: call it congenital cardiovascular defect. my grandmother says it’s the moon emptied of its many faces. it is against nature. creation has a will of its own. or is it a pact from the past made long ago? it happened in my mother’s womb, the blood vessels closest to my heart didn’t develop the way nature or the Creator intended. when the doctors say hereditary, my grandmother responds ancestrally – in prayer, songs gifted to her like birds. my mother and i do not know the words. but, when grandmother sings she is calling on horses to run in on clouds to protect us, to save us. ii. long ago, there was a man who loved my great great great grandmother. the love connected two people, two spirits so deeply it shook the earth. i imagine it, the way it should have lasted long after the moon. yet, he left her. his leaving made this hole passed down in my grandmother’s grandmother’s womb.
3.
there are no drains or lifeboats to save you, rather dozens of ships inside bottles, mast less. within the glass boundaries you built them in your image: impractical, on the brink of capsizing. each time you let yourself fall the stability in his voice threaded through the holes within you. one slight tug of the string heaved you into unhinged, then it was onto the next, a new thread, a new threat. you bottled up moments thinking love could be salvaged, tried to fill windless sails with whispered wishes: castaway, castaway, just enough to propel you to the next shatter. it wasn’t such a bad track record: you only fell in love about 35% of the time not wanting to be pulled like tides or lose control. anchored in illusion you ruined your own rigging to risk drowning in make-believe; it was so much easier to pretend to fall in love. when you were young you couldn’t see your actions coincided with leap years though it was never about the jump or fall. not at all. back then, you didn’t know you were born with rivers already flowing inside you. when you find yourself in a house with water rising: do not fear dying. spread your arms to lengths wider than sorrow could ever reach. embrace the collapse. free the parts that feed the heart in you that will always be a thirsty, overflowing ocean.
4.
ten little indians one in three Native American or Alaska Native women will be raped at some point in their lives sometimes the story is told differently: one little, two little, three little indians or not told at all. most know one story about indian boys torn between reservation and cities. tradition: bear root sage drumbeats history and what’s left? bear turned to beer dances to drunken driving, the stereotypical drunken indian and maybe we’re all gambling our lives away four little, five little, six little indians and it’s not just the boys, but our princesses too. per capita has made some greedy. for, blood quantum has turned us needy, craving to make ourselves whole. babies born into broken wombs, in a community where ten little indian boys should learn how to be men. instead, we ask: do they remember? how to touch a woman with respect. the old dances taught us, she chooses you seven little, eight little, nine little indians, ten little indian boys sit on the bus listening – their older cousins joke and tease, “see… that girl in baggy sweats about to get on? she had a train pulled on her this weekend.” they laugh, the little indian boys do, not knowing someday not too long from now men will gather around a fire singing forty-nine songs about love. maybe their father’s never taught them how to touch her, that loving her didn’t mean taking her blacked out where she wakes up not remembering, not remembering: ten little, nine little, eight little indians, seven little, six little, five little indians, four little, three little, two little indians. one little indian boy.
5.
6.
my favorite conversations are with my grandmother while she teaches me words in "Indian" as she says. I ask, how do you say, where did you go? and where are you going? Questions that layer my tongue in ash, reminding me of fire, the taste. Each time I speak, the slow burn of every loss I have witnessed cracks my lips. Go and going – acts singed into my bones so I ask. Teach me I’m coming with you so it sits rock heavy in my mouth because my tongue is at war with history, boarding school “Kill the Indian, Save the Man” acts of colonization. Strain pronunciation. When I want to say, take me with you it dis so l v e s before I can stomach the sweetness of language. Ours, I am losing. I am lost lodged somewhere in my throat between decades of bro ken syl la bles. Teach me how to reach the ones who are born already running. Teach me how to talk to the ones who need it most. Dear Universe, gift me words that l i n g e r softly like dusk. There must be a phrase to contain wherever you go whether or not you know where you’ve been or where you are going.
7.
Think one-drop rule. Prove race in blood. Each tribe, different rules. On each reservation the degree/ fraction is set you must be ¼ of the tribal blood in order to be member, be recognized. From the beginning we grow up knowing we are fragmented, a life carved into quarters and eighths of sorrow, faith, and grief. We are broken into phases, the moon waning, never waxing, in our fullness. Love’s symptoms became those of colonial disease (blood quantum), always piecing ourselves together to find an identity resembling wholeness. If we keep mixing ourselves with each new baby, each new love - making lessening blood quantum, eliminating us one half at a time. Our brokenness navigates like a compass danger destined. Drawn to each other, the deep-rooted sadness of so many things, passed down through the body, ancestral memory, trying to exist in two worlds. Blood presses at the floorboards, every step we take, it’s ingrained in the earth this land is your land this land is. My body’s mosaic landscape contains memories passed down in our bones. When we kiss, we travel time – history exists in our fingertips, colonization lingers on our lips. In love, we are countries colliding borders, and who wants to spend a lifetime at war.
8.
when angels speak of love i’m pretty sure they didn’t mean drunken hockey fans spraying fifty-seven native children with beer, taunting with racial slurs like “Go back to the reservation” If love is all coming and going this is coloniality starting back at its beginning with children so young they are still learning the meaning of words like, love and hate. And you gotta hate the way the world works when some words scar ears so deeply that the voice that said them still echoes in your head, still echoes in your head still echoes in your head. Love is action and we cannot tell where an echo ends and Begins Let’s think of it like this. Life begins with a woman giving birth; because of this she is sacred. Yet, our women are being taken. 1,181 reported missing and murdered in Canada alone and the numbers in the US are still unknown. Underreported not reported but we do have some statistics: Nearly half of all Native American women have been raped, stalked, or beaten. When angels speak of love I’m certain they didn’t mean this. Our women and children are being traumatized. 1 in 3 Native women will be raped in her lifetime & are 2.5 times more likely to experience sexual assault crimes compared to all other races. When does this race to feel safe and survive end? When you’re missing in life and missing in death, where do we begin? Nowadays when angels try to speak of love my ears strain to hear anything over the national news and media that barely, if ever mention us and I wonder if the silence is how we eventually disappear
9.
mamas put in Davis during children's naps time to let the miles of music unfold into sleeping ears. mamas fear this world where babies are born already confined, waiting in lines of funeral processions, the patient air reinforces lessons of Indians playing along to historically provided scores, the notes read: broken livers, diseased hearts, and distended bellies in newspapers or television. babies need the music, the rhythm and blues teach improvisation, the realization: life is making and creating. embedded in the call and response of crying shames reside voracious cold trains, bodies freighted with ache. mamas wanna teach children the riff between what goes on outside these man-made borders, the 'real' world where cars are named after Indians: Navajo, Cherokee, and Tacoma; they know the consequences of the American Dream. reality: just like those cars they too will end up buried in graveyards; if they’re not careful sooner than expected so mamas pray their children dream blues like cracked cups. broken may not be good luck but reminds us of survival, an object lesson: if you leave, leave blaring like trumpet, dented in all the places to sound your instrument loud for the trail of knowing behind you. history’s riffs may be blinding but babies need reminding when arms are strong enough to unravel muddy waters still needing to be crossed they are ready to embrace the splitting open like saxophone howling into the white space or ocean all to empty the darkness inside or to fill it with their own middle ground between the milestones and giant steps they’ll want to make in life. so whenever they think blues can be tasted with hands wrapped around bottle until they’re wasted they’ll remember their mama’s ingrained into their hearts unexpected deviations, their internal drums will beat louder than the drunken syncopations as they fall into no longer sweet grass laying flat on backs looking up at the Indian in the moon, in their sweat drenched sourness loving and wondering what's so damn wonderful about a world where we are whole notes unraveling.
10.
whenever two lips begin to form your name I cough stars lodged deep within my lungs. They rush from tongue weighted in dust, words I didn’t ask where are you going? or notice the blank spaces in your breathing as you slept. They say the more massive the star, the shorter the lifespan. They have greater pressure on their cores. Yours burned so brightly I should have known you’d collapse, disappear into image, a black hole dissolving trace amounts. I am left stargazing five times a day for years. Catalogue phrases. Chart each word. Label every facial expression. Telescope until eyes bleed constellations even then I can’t navigate my way into understanding light years – how we let darkness slip in. Is it madness to wonder if it ever really happened? You, a shadow never leaving until I inserted continents between us. I lost you in the crevice between night and day. You died while I was sleeping dreaming of a galaxy far far away where love eclipses. A rising tide of longing fills my body, bones, the ribs sheltering the cave within me echoing. Each night, I open mouth sky-wide to swallow stars and sing to the moon a story about the light of two people who continue to cross and uncross in their falling no matter how unstable in orbit.

about

This album features ten of Tanaya's favorite poems from her debut collection, poet Tanaya Winder sings the joys, glories, and laments of love. Love is defined by familial, cultural, platonic, and romantic bonds in these emotional and thoughtfully rendered poems. Her voice traverses the darkness in a quest to learn more about the most complex of subjects.

Praise for Words Like Love:

"Beautifully crafted, with grace, Words Like Love takes its place among the voices of Chrystos, Janet Marie Rogers, and Joy Harjo. Mahsi cho, Tanaya Winder. Your voice is astonishing."--Richard Van Camp, author of The Lesser Blessed: A Novel and Godless but Loyal to Heaven

“Tanaya Winder’s work offers us a profound knowing—that art cures; that the censured and frozen words of love can be born anew in the warm waters of our open mouths—from bathroom stall graffiti to the classroom poetics of “Patrick.” I am already changed by this collection: in its keen intelligence, its vast empathy, and in the courageous specificity of each and every remembered wounding. Gracias, hermana-hija-poeta.”—Cherríe Moraga, playwright, poet, and author of A Xicana Codex of Changing Consciousness

“These poems are a love song for a generation, for those who do everything they can to stand with dignity despite the insults, for those who have died tragically because they could not carry what these poems are carrying. Within these poems is the grief of losing a country, a family, a lover. The poet is a beautiful straggler of history who through poetry has learned how to fly.”—Joy Harjo, Mvskoke/Creek poet, musician, performer and author of Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings

“These poems are echoes from the intimacies of love songs, truth telling and survival. I can use them to make sense of my life as an Indigenous woman and in that way, Words Like Love is a cure for the god-shaped hole in my heart.”—Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, author of Islands of Decolonial Love

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released December 17, 2015

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Tanaya Winder Albuquerque, New Mexico

Tanaya Winder is a writer, educator, motivational speaker, and spoken word poet from the Southern Ute, Duckwater Shoshone, and Pyramid Lake Paiute Nations. She grew up on the Southern Ute Indian reservation and attended college at Stanford University where she earned a BA in English. She has a MFA in creative writing from the University of New Mexico. You can follow her on Twitter at @tanayawinder ... more

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