Part of a series of Native poetry collected by Mark Turcotte.
they built the mall of america
like a curse over the convergence
of our dreaming
they carved their brave explorers names
all men
into our mother’s tongue
(poetry)
Category: Poetry
This is the first of a series of Native poetry collected by Mark Turcotte.
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.
(poetry)
I have missed the predictable angles
of houses & the swollen arms
of buff dads. & these buff dads’
sullen children, their sullen faces
frowning across the road.
(poetry)
The latest in our FORTHCOMING series of excerpts from new and recent books:
A cloud spills grey
oil over their guns
They aim at a wolf
who, a second ago,
was someone’s son.
Someone is calling to you from the sea,
beating the heavy waves with his tired hands.
(poetry/translations)
In Kiefer’s Maine, the trucks, soon to contain slaughtered chickens, have “waiting mouths,” “the air [has] feathers”—as if all that’s left of that life is scattered to the wind. Kiefer braids losses throughout the book; it can feel as if loss, like farm grit, “filters into every soft thing.”
(reviews)
suns as yellow as ours
gleaming suns
from lives like matches
atrocious explosions
scattering ashes
like bright corollas
(translations/ poetry)
I didn’t know we lived a few counties
south from where Frederick Douglass stood
half-naked, one shirt for a whole winter.
His hands smaller than my brother’s
who took all the jokes on the school bus
(poetry)
how many egrets lost footing in the candles of your chest,
syllables broken by rust?
(poetry/ No Place is Foreign)
Man’s resentment at her for being torn in half, forced to share his Maker’s image but not enough to spare. He wept petitions in the lap of Tigris and Euphrates, “Please, please!” he moaned, “She’s too singular to be understood!”
(poetry)
My mother insisted
til the day she died
that I was born at a very early age
I still don’t know if I believe that
(poetry)
The song might be the length it took for a historic city to be destroyed (twenty-two minutes) one February evening.
Who collects the snow globes of war and of fathers?
A collection of snow globes, each says “it is snowing.”
(poetry)
if the Earth would just split in two
& one half would take its leave
I’d take a seat on the other half
& absorb the blue skies above
(translations/poetry)
Farmwork required
strong hands and body
not the somersaults
of ABCs in the mind.
(No Place is Foreign)
The latest in our FORTHCOMING series of excerpts from new and recent books:
exhausted like a French arthouse film
there’s always a male and female lead
reuniting for us
(TCTC translations/poetry)
to know everything
and understand everything
doesn’t guarantee I’ll be able to tell the difference between poisonous and edible
(No Place is Foreign/ translations)
The man
With the cash in his pocket.
Never less than a couple hundred.
You’d never know with what
He might be armed
At any given moment
Behind the charm.
(No Place is Foreign)
Because these times are fresh paint, fresh wax, fresh garlic. These times are new grass in the same wasteland where every spring new grass grows.
(poetry/translations)
Part of our series of pieces inspired by the Democratic Party’s 2024 platform.
I hope the water of Lake Michigan knows the water of your body like kin. I hope there is soil under your nails, that the light of necessary fires burns luminous in your corneas.
Between us – a screen, a thirty-minute flight, / the friendly/ uncaring world, / car crashes, NATO drills
Part of our series of pieces inspired by the Democratic Party’s 2024 platform.
I tasted only / freedom, opportunity, knew little of /
all the difficult work my body would / endure to exist here, examine patriotism.
Part of our series of pieces inspired by the Democratic Party’s 2024 platform.
in America under a big chandelier that fills my chest with ice
Blond women selling their hair injure their faces to produce
an altered shapeliness, their lips a pert woodland scene
The latest in our FORTHCOMING series of excerpts from new and recent books:
how anne frank would’ve been a belieber
& ur body beneath all those clothes
the color of my skin being important
to everyone but me
Part of our series of pieces inspired by the Democratic Party’s 2024 platform.
I am longleaf pine, soybean
and cotton fields. I am not American.
(poetry)
a dandelion doesn’t remember
when it sprouted
or how it ended up
in this yard.
(poetry/translations)
That Childhood Continent Beyond Illumination are pieces from a larger suite of automatic drawing/poem paintings, intentionally completed in an afternoon.
(art and text)
The latest in our FORTHCOMING series of excerpts from new and recent books:
Like a twig afloat on a sea of dirty towels, the feeling inside me, laid out on the countertop of my soul, filleted and sweating in the humid air. And yet, wonder eludes the twirling gearhulk of my heart.
Even a Banyan tree lives longer than an emperor.
The latest in our FORTHCOMING series of excerpts from new and recent books:
We each take what we can / from the angels that visit us.
The latest in our FORTHCOMING series of excerpts from new and recent books:
It is disrespectful to sleep over the stones / of the insane without dreaming our dreams.
Another Chicago Magazine 