callirhea

Whale Woman

The water was cold, dark, deep.

It spilled into her mouth.

Her long tail and strong fins cut through it,

gentle yet firm.

She swam and sank deeper into

her boundless home,

twisting and dancing through the

comforting darkness.

Her family followed close behind her,

each discovering the security of the sea,

the safety of salt.

She knew that sooner or later she would have to

head up to the surface for air.

She knew what would be waiting.

Fear encroached as she rose above the levels,

calling out to her family to stay close

and not to stay up for too long.

Time had hardened her.

Each barnacle came together

like a kind of armor.

If only these strange, finless animals couldn’t survive

on the water.

If only they would stop killing her family members.

As her hard skin breeched the water’s surface,

she knew.

She was to be gone.

She yelled for her children to swim deep,

swim quickly.

And in the end,

she tasted salt.

And now I can taste hers.

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Poetry - Pine Ridge Reservation

People,

young people.

Not fooled and

unmoved.

Not hurt

and not impressed

by the empty gestures

of power

and power plays.

Dark eyes

sharp like an obsidian’s edge

do not cast judgement,

but it is celar that they see

and they cut.

Cut down

a man-made tower

that was forged in 

dirty flame,

to block the view of 

mountains untamed.

Of rock and dirt

that, no matter how hard

you might try,

will remain unclaimed,

unknowing of constraints,

unknowing of pity and

of shame.

Your attempt to inflict damage

does not even come close to pain.

Poetry- For my Mother (2013)

I like to imagine that my umbilical cord started

at my left ventricle,

Traveled down through my stomach and out my belly button

to my mother’s own beating heart.

The Poetry involved in that type of idealism is

like oxygen to my blood stream.

She nourished my spirit for a

period of gestation and

Put her fingerprints all over my soul

in its infancy.

By the time I was pulled from that place,

I couldn’t shake her.

And even though I have a father too,

who loves me in the only way he knows how,

I remain eternally woven into

that woman’s heart strings.

She kept a few of mine and tied them in

double knots around her own.

I see colors and beauty through eyes that

look like hers.

I walk upon land with feet that

leave the same marks.

I sometimes struggle to discern where I start

and she stops.

Antsy cells split, and split again until

It was time for me to leave.

My hair grew leaving course traces of my

keratin replication across twelve thousand miles of salt and dirt.

I often wonder how our fingerprints would look

on top of one another in ink.

Here I sit, miles and minutes apart

from my inception.

Mirrors reveal a face with borrowed parts,

trying to feel like one-of-a-kind.

The mirror within uncovers that stolen heart strings

have made me whole.

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