1. |
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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?
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2. |
In My Mother's Womb
01:39
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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.
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3. |
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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.
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4. |
Ten Little Indians
01:51
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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.
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5. |
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6. |
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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.
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7. |
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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.
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8. |
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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
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9. |
Teaching The Riff
02:24
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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.
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10. |
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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.
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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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