[love] could be the memory of an answer in glass
[land] a star’s shadow on the moon
[suffering] the time it takes to mend a tear
[purpose] like thoughts carried by a cloud
[assimilation] like black clothes in the dark
[longing] the waters’ edge that never meets the roots
[loss] the dreams of a California jaguar
[rivers] regeneration drawing us below ground
[resistance] like a tooth in amber
[fascism] a finger wrapped too tight and turns blue
[hope] a surprise fortune from a stone
[colonization] a phantom limb buried under dust
[prayers] are swords made to rest
[self] could be creosote burning for time alone
[genocide] lights of fireflies’ lost in the trees
[resilience] poetry recited by thorns of nopal
[displacement] how the armadillo follows roads
[fuel] is a name we borrow
[belonging] the ruffle of feathers meeting
[hatred] like mud drying off a pig’s back
[motherhood] a hoarded medicine
[shame] the dark center of a balled pillbug
[home] warm current of wire under doves’ feet
[violence] like petrified wood exposed to wind
[future] the glow of our eyelids when we sleep
A decade out in the wild, I know
precisely how to gut a landlord.
Sharp obsidian blades cut the glass
walls of a real estate agency.
Bile bursts from the broken system.
This mind loop will burn a path
until it is freed.
Focused on survival,
I can’t recall how to be artful.
Bird in my chest restrained,
afraid of its own flight.
When one of my bonded pair of parakeets
died, the other half forgot how to be a bird.
We do not sing for ourselves, but we
are not ourselves without song.
Every lyric is for you, comrade,
and the longing to hear your resonance.
You are not just the work at hand,
a frantic earworm to refuse injustice.
Let mystery pour from the cracks—
pressure of beauty to burst open hearts.
Aimee Inglis is a citizen of the Osage Nation born and raised in Anaheim, CA, near the Santa Ana (Wanaawna) River, and currently living in Osage territory in Pawhuska, Oklahoma. She has worked in social movement organizations for housing and climate justice for fifteen years, has an MFA in Creative Writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts, and was a fellow with Indigenous Nations Poets. Their poetry has appeared in Under a Warm Green Linden, Anaheim Poetry Review, Poetry Northwest, About Place Journal, Forging, Litmus Press, and Beloit Poetry Journal. WEB
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