Poetry by Claire Maracle

denipet CC




Konnorónhkhwa, the blood that flows belongs to you

                    There is a river in         my body
            I accidentally tattooed it onto 
                      myself 
                     at 4am 
when everyone was looking I left
                    in search of a ticking 
                    clock
Surely the sound of it will remember 
my own blood 
heaving with elegant amoeba I refuse to name

Driftwood of the collarbone     
                
                   I call myself home

I sleep with a journalist on new years eve
                           her hair      curls in my fist
    She smokes too many         cigarettes
    leaves ashes in the                        river of me
    Floods the bed with                   body 

               Quotes heroin poems clean

I fuck her                           on the rooftop too
Til the stars come
        
vaulting across January's threshold

      Can a river be 
                                              gluttonous?
         Be hungry for what 
                                              a body does

        Can a river be sad & horny too?

I have this disease where                  I can’t get enough salt


                                     
   Every river
                                                                    Is part ocean
Maybe if I surrendered I'd become 
something 
                      like a Thundercloud

On the front page of the hotel’s instagram is 
                      the journalist kissing me
& I’m laughing/flooding/beckoning the river 
                       back into my mouth
               Cavalier/ caviar/crow kinda laugh 

I haven't had a cigarette in       six years

What does the river 
                                    know about these rolling box scars
     about glitter          about being half of anything?
     The river here is sick
                                             oil slick catfish
                                           littered refinery runoff stink
 
                          We do ceremony 

The river says it hurts to be 
                                the beginning
                                So much wind
 
                  I gather everywhere

Love hasn’t spoken my name in ages





Soon, God, Somewhere
after Quazzy

The babies grow up free
& the food is all sourced locally
We gather honey 
everywhere, honey
all of us in this room made real

We feasting 
On three sisters and everybody's ancestral dish 
And our descendants in the joint too
Soon, god, somewhere
We are sea level, sandy & the ocean has been restored 

The salmon are back 
home
is your sisters thick wealth reflected back in her green eyes 

Soon god, somewhere we are rich. 
All the nieces & all the nephews & soon to be somewheres
Grow up 
In this sky who has no memory of war
In these the streets who’ve never known gunfire

All of us glittered up with love
Poem drunk and creation stained 
Soon god 
somewhere
change is 
soon
 
God, somewhere 
everything you touch, you
God.





Peace, or, the absence of a thing

The absence of a thing I cannot enter
I bite my cheek at the same time as my sister
Finally, I am no one’s mother
Forever.

We gather ants in the yellow kitchen
We ants in the yellow kitchen
Cinnamon us home
Swollen knees, full heads of hair, 96 years old

No one is breaking eggs in this economy
Just us mopping vinegar to cut the yolk
Moths fly out of cereal boxes.
No one has died yet.
The body is a messy miracle

I watch it flail blue/coded
A young doctor works the chest
Compressions take turns
I cannot look away
I heard the heart stop beating
Linoleum soft nurses chatter as if
Life isn’t hovering in the ceiling
waiting to be called home. 

I leave 
To kiss my wife, urgently
to show my life that I mean business

96 years plus of business. I tell them I have the stomach for it.
Everyone believes me.

I am the one breaking eggs in this economy,
Gathering ants in the yellow kitchen
Milk in a mug & codeine. 

A white woman calls me a shaman
I laugh in indigenous
Or whatever blood quantum calls me/I cannot be a thing/deducted
A thing I cannot enter - that is my own
The land is a body
The body is a discoball, a code blue, anthill, honey 
full, head of hair, the body is a 
dance and I do not like the music
it is too beautiful. 

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Claire Maracle is a Mohawk member of the Six Nations of the Grand River, raised as a guest on Muscogee, Osage, and Cherokee lands. They are the Executive Director for Words of the People, a Native-led nonprofit working to normalize indigenous language creative works. Their poetry has been published in This Land Press, Emerge Magazine, New Words Press, Wayfarer Magazine & Super Present Magazine.


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