Waȟpániča
by Layli Long Soldier

I begin a line about white buttes that bend chiseled faces and click stone eyelids at night, but abandon it. Instead, I push my love into this world and mail you a summer letter. From mailbox to door, you read the commas aloud. I’ve become a wife of bottled water comma black liner at the lash comma and sleeves to the wrist. These weeks alone alone alone comma I pull my body to a table of empty chairs and sometimes I cannot stop the impulse to command. Alone alone I instruct sit down comma eat up comma and I write in detail to hush an echo comma the rupture of a fault line.

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I wanted to write about waȟpániča a word translated into English as poor comma which means more precisely to be destitute to have nothing of one’s own. But tonight I cannot bring myself to swing a worn hammer at poverty to pound the conditions of that slow frustration. So I ask what else is there to hear? A comma instructs me to divide a sentence. To pause. The comma orders a sequence of elements the comma is caesura itself. The comma interrupts me with, quiet.

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Father’s Day comma I am not with you. I stare at a black-and-white photo of you comma my husband in a velvet shirt comma your hair tied back and your eyes on the face of our sleeping daughter. When I write comma I come closer to people I want to know comma to the language I want to speak.

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Then a friend remarks When we speak comma question marks dashes lines little black dots or jiggle in the air before us comma in truth it’s the rise and fall of the voice we must capture to mean a thing in writing. Leaning his head toward a page with some vulnerable line he adds And isn’t it interesting how a comma can tip a phrase into sentimentality.

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So I disassemble mechanics comma how to score sound music movement across the page. I watch the compassionate comma slow the singular mind of two lovers. When we cannot speak our mind the comma will cool will sigh it will lick an envelope for us. Because the tongue of a comma is detached, patient.

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Yet I feel forced to decide if poor really means brittle hands dust and candy-stained mouths a neighbor girl’s teeth convenience store shelves Hamburger Helper a dog’s matted fur a van seat pulled to the living room floor those children playing in the carcass of a car mice on the floorboard my sweeping chill hantavirus the ripe smell a horse chewed ripped its backbone exposed the swarms of do-gooders their goodly photos the heat the cold the drunks we pass waving dollar bills again tonight a bang on the door the stories no one here can stop the urge to tell I am buried in. This is the cheapest form of poor I decide it’s the oil at the surface I’m tempted to say it. But a friend asserts that anyone asserting that poverty isn’t about money has never been stomach-sick over how to spend their last $3 comma on milk or gas or half for both with two children in the backseat watching. I agree to let meanings and arguments with my head thrust into the punctuation of poverty here, breathe.

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Because waȟpániča means to have nothing of one’s own. Nothing. Yet I intend the comma to mean what we do possess so I slow myself to remember it’s true a child performs best when bonded with a parent before the age of five closely comma intimately. Next to you comma our daughter closes her eyes and you rest your heads blue-black lakes comma historic glass across the pillow. She’ll keep this. And if it’s true that what begins as trouble will double over to the end will raise its head as a period to our sentence then I admit I perform best to the music in between the rise and fall of the voice. Nevertheless I dig through my pockets dresser drawers bookshelves comma meticulous picking comma because I must write it to see it comma how I beg from a dictionary to learn our word for poor comma in a language I dare to call my language comma who am I. A sweeping chill my stained mouth just oil at the surface comma because I feel waȟpániča I feel alone. But this is a spill-over translation for how I cannot speak my mind comma the meta-phrasal ache of being language poor.

The Economy by Ariana Reines

I didn’t love

That I had this

Tendency

Toward melody

Or the appetite for drama

Always obvious

In my thinking

& in everything

I did. I wasn’t TV

Though I watched myself

Sometimes passively

As though brained or

Bludgeoned out of the fullness

Of my own reality. I felt

I had to respect what seduced me

Even if stupidly—even when it made

Me stupid—or meant I was—

Making of my mind a begging bowl

Laying myself waste for the devil

Making an innocent victim of the child within

So ferociously did I fear

Something adult, like sovereignty

Survival was a big-

Box-store-bought

Blanket. Not wet

But scented

With the antiseptics

Of the factory

It would take days

To air out, get it to resemble

The picture of something homey

And grandmother-made

I know what it’s like to pay

Money for such.

The three-dimensional

Image of things. To find

Them feeling hollow and smelling

Wrong. I know what it’s like.

The imitation of life.

I almost know what it means.

I disciplined my own form and the thinking

Within me. That may not be a religion

But it is grim theology.

The more muscle I had the better

I felt I could contain and conduct

The sorrow within. The smoother

Ran my blood and lymph.

My body dismayed me and I hated,

Adored it. Recurrent dreams

Of defective dolls kept coming back

To warn me. You are not a thing.

You are not the object against which forces

Tilt that you cannot control.

You are the entire subject of the world.

Tears rolled down a cheek of stone

My friend Terry writes about water

And land, mother and brother

Like a singer. I once despaired

To her that the only endangered

Species I had managed to speak

On behalf of up to that moment

Was myself. This seemed squalid

And narrow to me. Terry said it was real

Territory. I blinked melancholy

Into the seething night

Like a spotted owl in the eye

Of a security camera

Black and white bird without

Offspring or prey. My body

Is filled with plastic

I left my mother to die

To write these lines

You will parry that such is a false

Economy. But so

Are all the other ones we live by