Natalie Diaz, Mojave.
Natalie Diaz is a Mojave American poet, language activist, and educator. She is enrolled in the Gila River Indian Community.
Natalie Diaz grew up in the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California, on the border of California, Arizona, and Nevada. She attended Old Dominion University where she played point guard on the women’s basketball team, reaching the NCAA Final Four as a freshman and the bracket of sixteen her other three years. After playing professional basketball in Europe and Asia, she returned to Old Dominion University, and completed an MFA in poetry and fiction, in 2006.
Her work appeared in Narrative, Poetry magazine, Drunken Boat, Prairie Schooner, Iowa Review, and Crab Orchard Review.
Diaz's debut book of poetry, When My Brother Was an Aztec, was a 2012 Lannan Literary Selection, a 2013 PEN/Open Book Award shortlist, and “portrays experiences rooted in Native American life with personal and mythic power.” One important focus of the book is a brother’s addiction to crystal meth. In 2012, she was interviewed about her poetry and language rehabilitation work on the PBS News Hour.
Diaz currently lives in Mohave Valley, Arizona where she directs a language revitalization program at Fort Mojave, her home reservation, and works with the last Elder speakers of the Mojave language.*
*www.wikipedia.com
Dome Riddle
Tonight I am riddled by this thick skull
this white bowling ball zipped in the sad sack carrying case of my face,
this over wound bone jack-in-the-box,
this Orlando’s zero, Oaxacan offering: cabeza locada, calavera azucarada,
cenote of Mnemosyne,
this sticky, sweet guilt hive, piedra blanca del rio oscuro,
this electric tom tom drum ticking like an Acme bomb, hypnotized explosive
device, pensive general, scalp-strapped warrior, soldier with a loaded God
complex,
this Hotchkiss-obliterated headdress, Gatling-lit labyrinth,
this memory grenade, death epithet, death epitaph, mound of momento mori,
this twenty-two part talisman wearing a skirt of breasts, giant ball of masa,
this god patella in the long leg of my torso, zoo of Blake’s tygers and canines,
this red-skinned apple, lamp illuminated by teeth, gang of grin, spit wad of scheme,
this jawbone of an ass, smiling sliver of smite, David’s rock striking the Goliath
of my body,
this Library of Babel, homegrown Golgotha, melon festival,
this language mausoleum: chuksanych iraavtahanm, ‘avi kwa’anyay, ‘ava iiyaly
kuupam,
sumach nyamasav,
this amygdale cage, misery penitentiary, hidden glacier hungry for a taste of titanic
flesh,
this pleasure altar, Frenchkiss sweatshop, abacus of one-night stands, hippocampus
whorehouse, oubliette of regret,
this church of tongue, chapel of vengeance, cathedral of thought, silvery-blue dome
of despair, attic confessional, plaza del toro y pensamientos,
this museum of Tribal dentistry,
this commodity cranium cupboard, petrified dream catcher, sun-ruined basketball I
haul—rotten gray along the seams—perpetual missed shot,
this insomnia podium, little bowl in a big fish, brain amphitheater, girl in the moon,
this 3 a.m. war bell tolling, tolling, duende vision prison, jar of fading stars,
this single scoop vanilla head rush, thunder head, fast ball, lightning rod,
this mad scientist in a white lab helmet, atom bomb mushroom cloud, ghost of
Smoking Mirror,
this hot air balloon, forgetful chandelier, casa de relámpago,
this coyote beacon, calcium corral of hot Perlino ponies, night blooming cereus,
gourd gone rattle, bankrupt factory of tears,
this Halloween crown, hat rack, worry contraption, Rimbaud’s drunken boat afloat
in the wine dark belly of my personal Monstruo,
this coliseum venatio: Borges’s other tiger licking the empty shell of Lorca’s white
tortuga,
this underdressed godhead, forever-hatching egg, this mug again and again at my
lips,
and all this because tonight I imagined you sleeping with her
the way we once slept—as intimate as a jaw, maxilla and mandible hot,
in the skin—in love, our heads almost touching.*
Natalie Diaz
*http://www.drunkenboat.com/db15/natalie-diaz
The Day Out of Time is the last day of the 13 Moon/28-day calendar, a day which is no day of the week or month at all, but a day to celebrate our galactic heritage and creative unification! It is up to us to co-create the world that we would like to see.
ETZNAB
Kin 218: White Planetary Mirror
I perfect in order to reflect
Producing order
I seal the matrix of endlessness
With the planetary tone of manifestation
I am guided by the power of death
I am a galactic activation portal
Enter me.
The Earth and myself are one mind.*
*Stat Traveler's 13 Moon Almanac of Synchronicity, Galactic Research Institute, Law of Time Press, Ashland, Oregon, 2015-2016.
The Sacred Tzolk'in
Sahasrara Chakra (Dali Plasma)
No comments:
Post a Comment