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Nine Emerging Native Voices, edited by Chicago’s Mark Turcotte.
When ACM asked me if I’d be interested in helping feature the work of Native poets to begin during National Poetry Month, I immediately thought it would be a great opportunity to ask a variety of Native poets I admire for recommendations to emerging poets. They were happy to share some names, both familiar and unknown to me. I was pleased by the generous and trusting responses I received from these poets, and I’m grateful to ACM for entrusting me with the process. — Mark Turcotte
Kateri Menominee is the ninth and final Native voice we are publishing in our series.
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Self-portrait of wild rice speaking to a cedar tree
Bright afterbirth, stalks clustered, bunched in a bed of woody stems. Will you
call me canadian rice, indian rice, or wild oats? Foreign names. Dusk grown green-
ing pods, grains, I frond and sway with them. Watch when I spill every heartache,
against bawa’iganaak, brown rods batting me against a concert of cosmic green.
With their knees bent or waist deep in lake ebb, fish foam brown and bile green,
weeping stonewort from your hair, we will be here, ever and forever, a green-
-ing Ogimaakway. I am embroidered so loose in this earthen skin, my dust quivers
on the bottom of a canoe. Brown beads raining on the soft corners of kayaks, green
polding’s dark woody petals bursting on the hem of a skirt. The summer of root berries
and rain, blood suckers nesting in the small crowns of your pinecones, a soft green
burn and balmy cedar air in your thicket. Thick mucus gumming my brown veins. Are you
comfortable here forever? In a thrush beside me? Your taste cedars my hulls, a forest green
tang from tree scape. We have known each other for eons, as we watch the same grey
fog in a glade twilight, smoke our skin in bulrush burn. Your boughs, dark feathers green-
-ing into plumes. It is unlike you to be this silent, as you bustle and break by swamp shore,
beseech me once more, because my friend, gaagige wezhaawashkozid. – Forever you are green
waaboosmowinong
Spit between teeth, sloping
erosion, bone gnawing on bone
Soft hillslide ebb
The hareling cluck
After purr:
a velveteen backyard grunt –
when a snare line snags the throat
and all you hear is bloody chortles
the heartstring neck, a red collar
waaboozeens
mowin geta!
Un-bent yellowed bone jags wedding ring
relics neck un-bowed sweet marrow mash
cracked animal breath ; a symmetry
of broken now imagine your throat:
able to press the words,
un click tongue
You watch your aunt unbutton a rabbit carcass
and you feel the vocal folds of your dark throat
contract descend a dark ache in your belly
to swallow a language ripped from another
Baashkanang
& golden nectar in dark painted night. You are sky hilt & smoked breastmilk soaked in moon glow. You sing Aanongoos, Aanongoos, as they map the night in a stellar luminary stream, celestial manidooshag skipping on lakeskin; our reflection, yours. The sky is the marbled black iris of a rabbit, a doe, an accidental alchemy. You re-measure the wildest parts of you, zhooshkodaabaanang, intersteallar sleds seafaring on galactic dusk. Another sobriquet of you, lightning crack roads. You are the beginning of cosmic canoes constructed of stardust, luminous galactic bark on mirrored river. I witness a conjunction, a coppered skyglow dusted on Gitchgaming. Crack a star in half like a quail egg & you will find they have truer name. The sound of fish-scales hissing on hot river rocks, a crackling bustle. What do you call starsong, besides a comet fletching? Or a bloodroot bouquet of dark space radix? I am in a lighthouse at the end of the world, made of basswood and bulrush, and I recognize the small secretive spaces of my own name, of ceremonial ether, of celestial smoke sporing into spatial crust, an un-bent way to take back what was lost. You dance on star milk, split unsoiled, an infinite musical foam sprayed on solar mountains.
This shape, star ferry
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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. 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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Kateri Menominee is Anishinaabe from Bay Mills, Michigan. She enjoys her leisure time playing video games, spending time with family, and listening to lo fi Legend of Zelda playlists on Youtube. Her poems have appeared in Drunken Boat, The IAIA Anthologies, and Radical Enjambment. Her poetry has been published in As Us: A Space for Women of the World, Connotations Press, Red Ink, Literary Hub, and New Poetry by Indigenous Women: A Series curated By Natalie Diaz. Her chapbook In Tongues is out now in Effigies II from Salt Publishing.
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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 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 others. 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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