Deborah Jackson-Taffa, Fort Yuma,
Deborah Jackson-Taffa is Dean's fellow and candidate for the MFA in Nonfiction Writing (2013) at the University of Iowa where she is currently working on a collection of personal essays. The summer of 2011 she was awarded a fellowship to attend the NY State Writers Institute at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs. In December 2011 she will present a portion of her thesis at the Université Michel de Montaigne Bordeaux 3 in Bordeaux, France.
An enrolled member of the Fort Yuma Indian Nation (Kwatsan), Deborah was raised in the Four Corners region of New Mexico and is proud to acknowledge a mixed heritage of Kwatsan, Laguna, and Chicana roots. She has backpacked, traveled, and lived among rural people in many lands including Italy, Senegal, Guinea Bissau, Indonesia, the Philippines, Mexico, and Alaska. Her most recent publication can be found in Best Travel Writing 2011. The world she imagines on the page is a reflection of both her roots and her wings.
One Month
one month
after the funeral, I pace
from ripped couch to window,
thick clouds, no coal spun light, electric
lines downed by blowing blackness.
Battery-run bird-clock
mimics falcon’s cry at midnight,
the giant cottonwood groans,
drops senescent limbs,
earlier today I worked
the false-light slot floor
of the Dancing Eagle Casino,
sirens and jangling quarters,
voices melded
in a begging-for-luck murmur,
a man telling his date scorpions
kill themselves sometimes during wind storms
by stinging themselves
over and over in the head.
But you drove into the canal,
drowned in that old Camaro,
with electric windows seized by water
and too much—.
Uncle, I sing you back on this
waning gibbous moon, saw
a truck on the freeway as I drove home
this afternoon, a flatbed trailer filled
with pruned branches of trees,
wheels bouncing over potholes,
hundreds of individual leaves fluttering
and waving at me as if
they were somehow able to stay alive.*
By Deborah Jackson Taffa
*http://www.drunkenboat.com/db15/deborah-jackson-taffa
BEN
Kin 233: Red Crystal Skywalker
I dedicate in order to explore
Universalizing wakefulness
I seal the output of space
With the crystal tone of cooperation
I am guided by the power of life force.
The tomb is a symbol that represents death, resurrection and the transmigration of souls.*
*Star Traveler's 13 Moon Almanac of Synchronicity, Galactic Research Institute, Law of Time Press, Ashland, Oregon, 2016-2017.
The Sacred Tzolk'in
Sahasrara Chakra (Dali Plasma)
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