Darkness of self-satisfaction
Extends further than my small hand can grasp, or warm
I feel beyond the veil of my misunderstanding
Not one possibility but six hundred and more, dampened
and stifled
and scuffed but nowhere near dead
Like a cat with poor vision, twisting its head
Around and from side to side
I try to fix eyes stark as coloured glass
On the correct impressions
My spirits, various and needy
fly about with tarot faces
Or lie about, complaining of misogyny
There is no medicine in the argument
I’m tired of hearing about it he says
I’m tired of hearing about it he says
Did he hear it once
Hearing
was it all he did
I need to clean my ears
Close my mouth
Of the nations splintered when Columbus came
He says but they enslaved
An NDN voice’s response on social media
-Angry- Cite your sources, you stupid white man
&
Of the nations pummelled back from the coast
He says but what are they doing now
And I say language revitalization
And he says where is their standing army
Can’t have a nation without a standing army
And I’m literally reading the Icelandic sagas
And not only did the Icelanders have their own goddamned country
They did it without an executive branch AND no standing army
And produced the greatest literature of medieval Europe
So go fuck yourself on that point
&
Of the nations who never ceded land
He says how do they expect to take it back
And I think to myself
O love your tower of books is now a prison
Words boil up, the well-loved face goes hard
They, they, they, and not
we, we, we.
I have responses, gleaned
From a longhouse and a glass pipe
Buried in the ground,
Right through the bones of dead Indians
How ‘nice’
Academics and dancers
They have told me what to say
But I said nothing.
I don’t want the fun of my visit to go away
There’s no such thing as race he says.
If you’re smart
You don’t say that when you’re white
And that pulls down more ire
I dreamed a grandmother, wizened
Wearing a blanket and street clothes
Came into the house
(Which the bank, independent of
the Musqueam and Sto:lo
said that I never owned)
And asked me
Am I not welcome here
Dreams are full of muffled silences
You can’t know how long they’ll last
And genocides, if no one calls them by name
Are best distributed; a little death here
A little dislocation there; days in the skookum house
And nights with fentanyl, hiding in the hit.
