The Dream Warrior
I am intentional to light
never capitulating the stars
or the sway of grasses in my mother’s mouth.
The red gash at my people’s breast
is a journey of words and deed,
exposed to the sun,
a river of blood that pours outward
beating against the sun at dawn.
I am intentional to light,
dancing upon the moon’s altar, where
dreams recede back into their sacred
hole. I am a dream warrior, protecting
the destinies of my children’s children,
with fists of familiar medicines,
with songs of soft gestures,
and brutal forgiveness.
I am a dream warrior,
silhouetted against the day of bad sign talk,
against the signing away of my mother’s breath,
against the part and parcel of your reality,
silhouetted against the road that severs
my people’s dream.
I am a dream warrior,
sleepless around my people’s fire, remembering
the beating down of the younger sisters,
the emasculation of fine young men,
all their smiles bright as the river’s moon.
I am intentional to light,
to the chins resting too long on sallow chests,
to the educating of my children of your missionary
positions. You return them lost to us.
I am a dream warrior,
intentional to light.
Never capitulating my people’s dream,
never capitulating the stars.
Leaving Holes
Spider palmed up
prays lunar
globular and darkly,
its brittle voice
scratches the trees.
Far away,
thumb-marks dream
of frosted glass.
Old throats eddying
with age,
sound the water.
Fingertips hardened
into sleep, curve
the eggdish of moon.
Birds oily black
peck into the air
with honed beaks,
leaving holes.
Plateaued onto sleep
ghosts dogear the eaves
and silently
salt the sea.
Somnambulist inks
the sperm
pressed against
the shadows,
pressed against
the window of night.
Flesh imparts itself,
hand into wing
wing into tongue.
Mossy gray pebbles
their lips stilled,
brood inside the gourd
as spider turns to fog
fog turns to earth
and earth turns to song.
Origin and Sombra
Viscera of night beats canopic
in our hands of wet spiders, crawling
towards the edge of moonlight, a lake
of abysmal origin and sombra.
We are remembering
missiled plumes of destruction
and pungent strikes of lightning,
cataclysmic designs slurred across
the primordial horizon, silhouetting
the pithy ghosts of our names.
(Our sorrow will be short lived)
We are remembering
the language of eclipsed stars
murmuring among the cattail and reeds,
their voices blue in water
and refractive mirror. A vain distance
of darkness held in preened gesture.
We are remembering
our mother’s hair of bee’s wax
and saddened cuspidors, kicked aside
by editions of blood and cadres
of spitten rubies, their rank sputum
eases from the gables of higher houses.
In their frenzy, diaphanous nightshade
and in mourning.
We are remembering
the black ink of our misery, touched
to our mouths with fingertips,
the blueprint in orifice of speech
and pulsing hearts, emerging
like a thousand suns, blistering
a calligraphy upon our skins.
We are remembering
the returning of ourselves
to our selves,
over and opening
to this light, forever.
Originally published in Leaving Holes & Selected New Writing by Joe Dale Tate Nevaquaya (Mongrel Empire Press, 2011). Appeared in This Land: Spring 2015.