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My Father Was Called by the Same Name
Now, I am called. Listen.
Does it transfuse my blood
with aromatic bitter or is it just
a fissure, infected, red that weeps
golden if I hold a pen too tight?
Tight enough to call a pulse
a prayer to bring you back,
though I know no incantation
has yet to stop the falling scythe
or reverse the irreversible cessation
of all your biological functions.
Listen, someone wants to reach you,
but it’s my body that sways to the ring.
Instead, have I had a chance to tell you?
Death is the distance that separates
who we are, but you still are.
My father. I am your only son.
Look. In my hands I hold a name.
Ours. This proper noun we share.
Oh how you follow me still.
Fingertip & Palm
My skin a corroded silk I wear
for no audience but the apparition
that stares at me from the otherside
of a sunlit pool of reflection, he warns
of a day we will drown beside the tide,
of water ceded to gasoline, ignited, he is
yesterday and tomorrow and here I remain.
Today this skin of mine in memoriam to him,
I have watched it bleed against cold concrete,
I have felt it inflame against nickel and chlorine,
I have scratched it red as a vein of molten Earth
to see myself become a withered desert,
to stand along the precipice of years gone
to sand from the womb of another hourglass
thrown from the husk of tattered Babel,
this skin I cannot save from my own weary eye,
these eyes or his eyes or our eyes, he reaches
to cup his chin in my rusted fingers,
to remember the softness of our youth,
to pull the Marlboro from between our lips
and map the constellations across our face
with fingertip and palm, a prayer of flesh
our hands find through ashen generations
of tissue wilted, starved in time, a shield
we share: this vellum, this swollen tide.
Body of Earth
If this body is composed of Earth,
I refuse to become a cloud of ash
or a dervish of devil’s dust or allow
my blood to be siphoned, my veins
drilled to quench the serpent tongue.
The spit of these words will never not fall.
This skin will not give way to eroded desert.
My hands will not be cast in polyethylene.
My arms will not embrace the leaded weight,
augury of death. These teeth will not masticate
the scattered carrion, all this wasted life, nature,
wasted in the name of some ruby, diamond dog,
but this body carved of earth will not be razed
nor these bronchial forests reduced to cinder.
There will be no fever dream, no sky inflamed.
Here is my mother, her body composed of Earth.
Here is my father, his body composed of Earth.
Here is my grandmother who gave us light.
In every eye, silver dawn, the obsidian night,
deeper now, past the lens, a vitreous sea,
like water, is water, the body and the Earth.
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Mark Turcotte (Turtle Mountain Band Anishinaabe) has been an active member of Chicago’s thriving poetry scene for some 30 years, and was just named as the sixth Illinois Poet Laureate. He is the author of four collections, including The Feathered Heart and Exploding Chippewas. His poetry and prose have appeared in national and international journals and magazines, and are included in the first-ever Norton Anthology of Native Nations poetry. He has received awards and recognitions from The Lannan Foundation, the Wisconsin Arts Board and the Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers & Storytellers. His poem, “The Flower On,” was part of the Poetry Society of America’s inaugural Poetry In Motion project, which placed poetry posters on public transportation in cities across the United States. The PoetryUnbound podcast, hosted by Pådraig Ó Tuama, recently featured his prose-poem, “Dear New Blood.” He served as 2008-09 Visiting Native Writer at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe and has since been teaching in the English Department at DePaul University, where he is Distinguished Writer-in-Residence.
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Anthony Ceballos lives and writes in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where he can be found penning staff recommendations at Birchbark Books & Native Arts. He is a first-generation descendant of the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe. In 2022, he was selected to participate in the inaugural Indigenous Nations Poets retreat in Washington, DC, as well as their 2024 retreat in the Twin Cities. In 2016, he was selected to be a mentee in The Loft Literary Center’s Mentor Series program. He has been published in Yellow Medicine Review, Water~Stone Review, Queer Voices: Poetry, Prose, and Pride, and the anthology Another Last Call: Poems on Addiction and Deliverance, among others. His first collection of poetry, Glassful of Prayer, will be published by Trio House Press in February of 2026.
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Chris Pappan (Kanza, Lakota) b. 1971
Chris Pappan is an enrolled citizen of the Kaw Nation and honors his Osage and Lakota lineage. His cited artistic influences are the Lowbrow art movement, Heavy Metal and Juxtapoz magazines, and taps into the American cultural roots of 1970s underground comics, punk, and hot rod cultures. His art literally reflects the dominant culture’s distorted perceptions of Native peoples and is based on the Plains Native art tradition known as Ledger Art. A graduate of the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe and a nationally recognized painter and ledger artist, Chris’s work is in numerous museums such as the National Museum of the American Indian (Washington DC), the Tia collection (Santa Fe, New Mexico), and the Speed Museum of Art (Louisville, Kentucky) among many other US and international collections. He is represented by Blue Rain Gallery in Santa Fe. Chris is currently a board member and co-founder of the Center for Native Futures, a Native American gallery and studio space in downtown Chicago. He lives and works in Chicago with his wife, Debra Yepa-Pappan, and their daughter, Ji Hae.
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