Roasting Ear
We migrate south every summer,
become hunters and gatherers
inside freeway travel stops,
transform into News Bees, wings detached,
somewhere across the Arkansas state line.
Flat black snake heads bob like fishermen’s floats
above the surface of the creek –
Mama lays on the bank like a teenager,
one of the scaled things curled up,
sunning on her pale belly.
We feed pups and piglets on bottles,
learn the art of swelling bellies
with canned milk,
learn that there is always a runt
who doesn’t survive.
Red wasps dig holes in the walls, lay eggs,
sting my sister and leave crimson bruises
across her body like warnings.
Suddenly – the body of a hummingbird slaps
onto the porch like the first drop of summer rain.
For breakfast, Granny eats a pack
of cigs between sips of coffee.
By suppertime, she’s coughed them back up,
transformed them into the garden tools
she uses to dig a circle of holes around us.
At church, we wear housewife smiles and become a rope
tugged between two white men’s hands.
They make us sing. They ask where our father is –
who art in heaven, who art back home on the reservation,
a sinning man. hollow be thy name.
Diapers stacked like creek stones next to Papa’s body.
His brain tornado-snapped, he points
towards the corner of the room, asks
who is that staring at me?
No, Papa, it couldn’t be an angel.
Two deer hooves write a nightmare in the yard –
it stands on hind legs and watches us
from just below the house,
the pine trunks not wide enough
to hide its torso, gray and scarred like a man’s.
Someone is in the plastic chair now,
sitting quietly – a reminder of persimmon trees
and the slow creaking of the cellar door
as the day blossoms into nighttime,
into something like a blackberry.
The whippoorwill’s song is growing nearer–
We hold hands on the bank of the pond,
the night humid, the moon a tobacco flower.
Then, suddenly– a dash of lightning.
Or was it a shooting star?
Emily Clarke (she/her) is a Cahuilla poet, journalist, editor, bead artist, activist, and traditional Bird Dancer. Emily is currently serving as the 2022–23 Graton Roundhouse Intern for Heyday Books and News from Native California. She is a two time recipient of the UC Riverside Chancellor’s Award for Poetry, a 2022 Pushcart Prize nominee, winner of the Riverside county Bosworth Award for “Activist of the Year,” and a recipient of The Center for Cultural Power’s 2022 Artist Disruptor award. In her free time, Emily runs her small business, Cahuilla Woman Creations, preforms her work at various events, and co-edits her literary magazine, Rejected Lit Mag.