I-gv-yi-i Tsa-la-gi Go-whe-lv-i: A-sgo-hni-ho-‘i / First Cherokee Lesson: Mourning
Find a flint blade
Use your teeth as a whetstone
Cut your hair
Talk to shadows and crows
Cry your red throat raw
Learn to translate the words you miss most:
dust love poetry
Learn to say home
My cracked earth lips
drip words not sung
as lullabies to my infant ears
not laughed over dinner
or choked on in despair
No
They played dead until
the soldiers passed
covered the fields like corpses
and escaped into the mountains
When it’s safe we’ll find you
they promised
But we were already gone
before sunrise
I crawl through a field of
twisted bodies to find them
I do everything Beginning Cherokee
tells me
Train my tongue
to lie still
Keep teeth tight
against lips
Listen to instruction tapes
Study flash cards
How can I greet my ancestors in a language they don’t understand
My tear ducts fill with milk
because what I most love
was lost at birth
My blood roars skin to blisters
weeps haunted calls of owls
bones splinter
jut through skin
until all of me
is wounded
as this tongue
Ta-li-ne-i Tsa-la-gi Go-whe-lv-i: A-ni-s-gi-li / Second Cherokee Lesson: Ghosts
Leave your hair
at the foot of your bed
Scratch your tongue
with a cricket’s claw to speak again
Stop the blood with cornmeal
Your ancestors will surround you as you sleep
keep away ghosts of generals presidents priests
who hunger for your
rare and tender tongue
They will keep away ghosts
so you have strength
to battle the living
Stories float through lives
with an owl’s sudden swooping
I knew some Cherokee
when I was little
My cousins taught me
My mother watches it all happen again
sees ghosts rush at our throats
with talons drawn like bayonets
When I came home speaking
your grandmother told me
I forbid you to speak that language
in my house
Learn something useful
We sit at the kitchen table
As she drinks iced tea
in the middle of winter
I teach her to say u-ga-lo-ga-go-tlv-tv-nv/ tea
across plastic buckets of generic peanut butter
wonder bread diet coke
Try to teach her something useful
I am haunted by loss
My stomach is a knot of serpents
and my hair grows out
as owl feathers
Tso-i-ne-i Tsa-la-gi Go-whe-lv-i: A-nv-da-di-s-di / Third Cherokee Lesson: Memory
Raid archeologists’ camps
and steal shovels
to rebury the dead
Gather stories like harvest
and sing honor songs
Save the seeds
to carry you through the winter
Bury them deep in your flesh
Weep into your palms
until stories take root
in your bones
split skin
blossom
There are stories caught
in my mother’s hair
I can’t bear the weight of
Could you give me a braid
straight down the middle
of my back just the way I like
So I part her black-going-silver hair
into three strands
thick as our history
radiant as crow wings
This is what it means to be Indian
Begging for stories in a living room
stacked high with newspapers magazines baby toys
Mama story me
She remembers
Great Grandmother Nancy Harmon
who heard white women
call her uppity Indian during
a quilting bee
and climbed down their chimney with
a knife between her teeth
She remembers
flour sack dresses
tar paper shacks
dust storms blood escape
She carries fire on her back
My fingers work swiftly as spiders
and the words that beat in my throat
are dragonflies
She passes stories down to me
I pass words up to her
Braid her hair
It’s what she doesn’t say
that could destroy me
what she can’t say
She weeps milk
Nv-gi-ne-i Tsa-la-gi Go-whe-lv-i: U-de-nv / Fourth Cherokee Lesson: Birth
Gather riverbank clay
to make a bowl
Fill it with hot tears
Strap it to your back
with spider silk
Keep your flint knife close
to ward off death
and slice through umbilical cords
Be prepared for blood
Born without a womb
I wait for the crown of fire
the point where further stretching is impossible
This birth could split me
I nudge each syllable into movement
Memorize their smells
Listen to their strange sleepy sounds
They shriek with hunger and loss
I hold them to my chest and weep milk
My breasts are filled with tears
I wrap my hair around their small bodies
a river of owl feathers
See they whisper We found you
We made a promise
This time we’ll be more careful
Not lose each other in
the chaos of slaughter
We are together at sunrise
from dust we sprout love and poetry
We are home
Greeting our ancestors
with rare and tender tongues
