Sister Nations: Native American Women Writers on Community

Revah Mariah S. Gover

Revah Mariah S. Gover Skidi/Tohono O’odham Conjure There is a story. There is a story that is painted upon the walls of flesh and skin, Rises before the eyes in splashes of red ocher and cold clear wind. The storyteller stretches the mind. Leaping agile memory disguised as song. It is all there trapped, or liberated, by coffee-stained words woven Into the warm breath of cigarette smoke and desperate remembrance. I saw it once—it shimmered and fell heavily against my auntie’s memory of Uppitt. Uppitt. I smell it on the crisp taste of wind fingering my hair, watering my eyes. They say that the story doesn’t change, only the storyteller. Maybe the feelings are all the same—but a baby dying from hunger knows That it is loved as his mother, and hers, conjure milk from barren breasts. There is no miracle of imagined milk for those starving for the purity of Truth. She sheaths herself in chameleon red and doesn’t want to be recognized anymore. Orphans, alienated from wardance songs, these babies are as husks. Crouch in alleyways, huddle in dirty jackets, suckle booze, smell of piss and cedar. 79 Beauty can be found in the mouth of the teller. The story creates the world. The Word. There is a story. There is a story that is painted upon the walls of flesh and skin. The brush of certainty caresses it sweetly with earth and tears. There is a story with a different ending, imagining birth. Long Division I reside in a world of halves. Half desert, half plain— a dimension where lightning cracks a watercolor sky; sometimes violet, sometimes gray—jagged mountains mirroring infinite black and infused points of light. A world in halves, a world in halves; my Uppitt knew. He believed in educated power, the need for alien thoughts spun into alien words, the birth of this new world and our survival this way. Eyes closed and dreaming, secrets burrowed a thorny chasm of hope. I am Mother, today, I am Woman. A tornado of warring sentiments—born of the soul, etched in the womb, desire within desire—and how do I keep either side from winning? Today, I struggle to find my way in death, or rebirth— unable to conjure myself in breath or sound. My spirit crumbles with the living and turned out of my body I don’t have the strength to navigate the Stars. What I lost Uppitt always had—I see him sometimes, pointing to his Mother, the Moon. 80 Singing lullabies my tongue twists around the shape-sounds, and colored hues of an enemy language. Clear tones of alabaster wince at the brown of my eyes, the black of my son’s hair, the pulse of my Heluska heart and his rhythmic sleep-breath. I reside in a world of halves. Wielding arrows and obsidian knives I bare resistance to those who would suck my being through the nipple of Manifest Destiny—masquerading as Christ, ordained as God. Shuddering, I am horrified by good intentions and smallpox. Wrapped in a blanket of fear I clutch diplomas to ward off evil. Refuse to dream, turn my face away from grace— strive to embrace and deny who I am, who my children are, and who we will always be. I have given birth and I have created with words. I have danced and I have sung the old songs. Clutching the earth by my fingernails I will invent a song that will save me as I walk this ledge. A blade of sweetgrass between my teeth, I pray. Words you cannot hear, and I cannot say. 81 ...