Four Poems

Four Poems Kenzie Allen (bio) love song to the man announcing pow wows and rodeos How your voice over salted flankslicks tender, and when you say young ones,our future, hitches left like making room,and when you name the horses, booms low,storms a kick-up moan, chases them down,as spotted silverfish in a round pen quarrelthen shoot back out the entrance,spot-lit and away in a shuddering.Name me a jingle dress in neon and gold leaf,bespeak moccasins for my turning feet—with my mother’s best beading—paint her having sewn those seedsonto leather backing all of my life.Welcome the crowd to my birthand the language to my ears, early,my name, early, wampum andthe good spirits everywhere and early.Don’t send me home without a round of applauseif not a title, if not a good ride and a fast time. Previously published in Narrative Magazine [End Page 110] with thirteen moons on your back For the Desert Tortoise like tree bark curled into whirlpools of stone,burrowed under earth while the sun burned down and Coyote roamed the sand— do we, too, returneach to our burrows in the shivering dark, wear armor as a shelter we can carry,don’t we, on your back, touch earth? Sometimes, ever so slowly, we learn of the sweetnessof cactus fruit, mesquite grass, the arid wind as the sound of an ocean rustling in creosote,what the long-awaited rain can yet resurrect. Coyote watches. He marvels; what small wisdom,your survival, in this rising heat, in this strange home you have made. Previously published in Alphabeast: a book of poems. [End Page 111] even the word oneida / can’t be written in oneida1 What ails the nation’s liesunseats the sustenant. At least, it tilts halos, allies loss, attunes statues to skeletal white noon, an oilskin title, a tesselate easeI salute. I, the tithe, Ithe hesitant (no) saint (no) unholy. I, in the nuns’ salon. Thus, they anoint the (un)hostile entity— the we who talk less; sweat less;listen heat-less, sans teeth. All alleles, all eons, all heathen shell unsewn shakes whole a lethal sienna, a toll to hasten want. An unlikely whetstone,this State without yokeouthunts its own lie, lawless skyline in awe at the likeness, the kiln,the hush, how it shines. Previously published in Bellingham Review [End Page 112] red woman If I am blood-ruled, let it beas every pinch of tobacco taken from medicine pouches and forcibly tuckedunder the white shirt of a thirteen-year-old girl, now emptyeven of prayer, or a girl whose last sight is the river,or a girl whose last sight is the river, or a womanwhose last sight is the anger even before the river,or a boy, who grabs a knife and calls the cops and tells themhis own description; I tell you, that’s despair I know well. I’m cuter with my mouth shut.Sexy, with two black braids. The words sound better when I don’tspeak them at all, so they tell me, I’m all anger and bad giver, a riot waiting to happenin that short little skirt, they say. They ask me to wash my hairin the river. To see what it would have been like. Smile, they say. Those braids are dangerous.They say where are you walking so late at night.Previously published in Embodied: An Intersectional Feminist Comics Poetry Anthology. [End Page 113] Kenzie Allen kenzie allen is the author of Cloud Missives (Tin House, 2024). A finalist for the National Poetry Series, she is the recipient of a James Welch Prize for Indigenous Poets, a 92NY Discovery Prize, and the 49th Parallel Award in Poetry. She is a direct descendant of the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin. notes 1. A lipogram using only the 13 letters which correspond between English, latinized Oneida, and moons on a turtle’s back Copyright © 2023 Kenzie Allen