I
am what I have done—
A
sweeping gesture to the thorn of mast jutting from my mother’s spine—spine a
series of narrow steps leading to the temple of her neck where the things we
worship demand we hurl her heart from that height, still warm, still humming
with the holy music of an organ—
We
do. We do. We do and do and do.
The
last wild horse leaping off a cliff at Dana Point. A hurtling God carved from
red clay. Wings of wind. Two satellite eyes spiraling like coals from a
long-cold fire. Dreaming of Cortés, his dirty-beard and the burns it left when
we kissed. Yet we kissed for years and my savage hair wove around him like
braids of smoke.
Skeletons
of apples rot the gardens of Thalheim. First snow wept at the windows while I
held a man’s wife in my arms. I palmed her heavy breasts like loot bags. Her
teeth at my throat like a pearl necklace I could break to pieces. I would break
to pieces. Dieb.
A
bandit born with masked eyes. El Maragato’s thigh wound glittering like red
lace. My love hidden away in a cave as I face the gallows each morning, her
scent the bandana around my face, her picture folded in the cuff of my boot.
The
gravediggers and their beautiful shoulder blades smooth as shovel heads. I
build and build my brother a funeral, eating the dirt along the way—queen of
pica, pilferer of misery feasts—hoarding my brother like a wrecked Spanish
galleon. I am more cerulean than the sea I swallow each day on the way to
reaching out for him, to sing his name, to wear him like a dress made of
debris.
These
dark rosettes name me Jaguar. These stripes are my slave dress. Black soot. Red
hematite. I am filled with ink. A codice, splayed, opened, ready to be burnt in
the square—
I
am. I am and am and am. What have I done?
Natalie Diaz
Natalie
Diaz
Natalie
Diaz is Mojave and Pima and grew up in the Fort Mojave Indian Village in
Needles, California. She played professional basketball in Europe and Asia for
several years before completing her MFA at Old Dominion University. She
currently lives in Mohave Valley, Arizona, where she works to revitalize the Mojave heritage language by
documenting the last Elder speakers of Mojave. Her work has appeared in Prairie
Schooner, Iowa Review, North American Review, Crab Orchard and others. When My
Brother Was An Aztec, her first book of poetry, is forthcoming from Copper
Canyon Press in 2012.
SOURCE: http://www.drunkenboat.com/db15/native-american-women-poets
These Hands, If
Not Gods
by Natalie Diaz
Haven’t they
moved like rivers—
like Glory, like
light—
over the seven
days of your body?
And wasn’t that
good?
Them at your
hips—
isn’t this what
God felt when he pressed together
the first
Beloved: Everything.
Fever. Vapor.
Atman. Pulsus. Finally,
a sin worth
hurting for. Finally, a sweet, a
You are mine.
It is hard not
to have faith in this:
from the
blue-brown clay of night
these two
potters crushed and smoothed you
into
being—grind, then curve—built your form up—
atlas of bone,
fields of muscle,
one breast a fig
tree, the other a nightingale,
both Morning and
Evening.
O, the beautiful
making they do—
of trigger and
carve, suffering and stars—
Aren’t they,
too, the dark carpenters
of your small
church? Have they not burned
on the altar of
your belly, eaten the bread
of your thighs,
broke you to wine, to ichor,
to nectareous
feast?
Haven’t they
riveted your wrists, haven’t they
had you at your
knees?
And when these
hands touched your throat,
showed you how to
take the apple and the rib,
how to slip a
thumb into your mouth and taste it all,
didn’t you sing
out their ninety-nine names—
Zahir, Aleph,
Hands-time-seven,
Sphinx, Leonids,
locomotura,
Rubidium,
August, and September—
And when you
cried out, O, Prometheans,
didn’t they
bring fire?
These hands, if
not gods, then why
when you have
come to me, and I have returned you
to that from
which you came—bright mud, mineral-salt—
why then do you
whisper O, my Hecatonchire. My Centimani.
My
hundred-handed one?
- See more at:
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/23659#sthash.KRswiNUn.dpufAbout this
poem:
"The images and hands of this poem
began building during Mass one Sunday. The reading was about the laying of
hands on someone, and I began thinking of how my own hands work upon a body.
How they do things both beautiful and awful—to gently trace a throat in one
moment, to hold it tightly in another—a type of sweet wreckery that makes me
feel godlike and helpless all at once." Natalie Diaz
See more at:
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/23659#sthash.KRswiNUn.dpuf
Stephanie Doty
Women’s Issues Matter
April 9 2014
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/
