Zoë Bird
Hiawatha
This lake just ahead is named for the co-founder of the Iroquois confederacy, aka "The World's Tallest & Largest Indian" in Ironwood, Michigan, yet another white fiction. So naturally it began as a swamp. They built purple marten houses and a golf course, joined forces with the creek, invited more geese. The tennis coach is an inspirational speaker—in winter you can hear him screaming at a diagonal to the first cracks in the ice. Lately the trees tried to leave, uprooted themselves and stretched to walk but fell and could not rise again. Now coyotes gambol the beach, hooting for cats, a man shouts, A Woman Alone! I hope you are strong! From the window is close enough, I guess, to watch herons brush the silver perimeter, bear away golden shiner, white sucker.
A Sense of Pressure
Streetlight in the still
creek: tornado, contained
as myth or spirit.
Leaves are one
while falling, many
once they have fallen.
E pluribus unum:
out of many, one (who
thinks of himself
as the only one. And
another one of those.
And another).
Dark clusters visible
in the trees now,
the year’s abandoned nests
exposed. Evicted.
A shaking woman
approaches in the parking lot
but the fountains are shut off,
eyes just plain shut
for the season.
Today's scream scratched
into sandstone by the river
with a stick.
Where the wild iris grew,
ripe burrs, burst milkweed,
creatures fleeing,
a sense of pressure.
Last week it was 800 troops,
today it’s 15,000. Hungry ghosts
prefer hungry children,
I guess.
We are slow.
What are we waiting for,
someone to kick the door in?
Or maybe lichen,
the slowest python.
The neighbors have snaked
a metal ramp from the sidewalk
to their front door,
strung it with orange lights
for Halloween.
Lollapalooza
We ate the whole thing
made a smorgasbord of it
smashing every plate
we ate
We lay down at the docks with our lips to the brine
and sucked out every coelacanth
every stain
we became
ferocious
because we understood
the dying with our mouths
lifted their bodies from bulletriver crossings
from bulldozed groves of ancestral olive
from the unnatural glow of unearthed diamonds
the uranium we could not replace
we ate
We ate every wall and cage and congeladora
drank down deep the cholera waters
and ate everything
we ate the whole thing
and as we chewed
landmines tore our faces
like a million pairs of satanic scissors
still we chewed
till they turned to silk
with which to bathe the raped
in rose and raspberry leaf
We divided this clot of darkness like a pie
and we ate it
we ate the whole thing
It is finished in beauty
It is finished in beauty
It is finished in beauty
It is finished
in beauty
Notes:
A lollapalooza was (also) a giant eight-scoop sundae served at Bridgeman's in Minneapolis. If you ate the whole thing, you won a prize.
It is finished in beauty is a line repeated in Diné ceremony.
About Zoë Bird
Zoë Bird is a collaborative poet, artist, and activist, and the director of the Alzheimer's Poetry Project Minnesota (www.alzpoetrymn.org) since 2012. Her poems have recently appeared in Sin Fronteras/Writers Without Borders; the Minnesota Center for Book Arts' Quilt Not Quilt: The Afterlife show and the anthology Stitch by Stitch (Artichoke Press, 2018), and she is currently at work on two full-length poetry manuscripts. Bird and her wife live in Minneapolis.