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(POETRY)

DISTANCE, SOCIAL AND TEMPORAL; OR MARCH 2020 ON INDIAN TIME

  ZOË JOHNSON


            “indian time is a form of time travel”
                        “Towards a Theory of Decolonization”
Billy-Ray Belcourt, This Wound Is a World
 
 
It is easy to feel lonely
When you have been taught 
That you live only one second per second
 
It is easy to feel lonely when you forget
That the world does not go forward
But in circles
 
Walk down to the river with me.
When you are lonely, look to the soft fresh mud at the riverbank
Look for the marks of the congregations
The echoing passages of claws and hooves and tiny talons
Of the imprints of songbirds and deer and raccoons 
Of stray cats and stray writers that have stopped by the water’s edge 
And pressed their feet into the place where the soft earth
Meets the water
 
It is easy to feel lonely when you have been told that
Time only moves in one direction
That you cannot sit on creek-side tree roots 
With your ancestors,
With your distant cousins,
That your feet do not also press down into the mud of the earth
That you are not also a thirsty creature 
Making tracks others will follow
 
It is easy to feel lonely when you have been told
That the river does not know you 
By the drumbeat of your footsteps
By the songs your blood remembers 
Even if your tongue is still trying to learn them
(Re-learn them)
 
I am here to tell you that is wrong
 
Try to tell the trees that the only direction one may grow 
Is horizontal
Try to tell the river that the edges of its body are not malleable,
That rivers do not travel across time to reach distant relatives by 
Carving new tributaries and creeks across the land.
 
Try to convince me--
with the taste of wild leeks still humming on my tongue
empty mussel shells glittering lavender cloudy-sky
washed with humble grateful fingers in the chilly March creek--
that there are only four directions.
 
Try to tell the trees that skyward is not a direction one may grow,
That earthward is not a direction roots may reach in,
That ancestor-ward 
And descendant-ward 
Are not also places I may visit.
 
Try to tell me that I am alone here
I will take you by the hand and we will walk along the river together
Our boots and 
Makizinan 
And bare soles 
Will take a stroll together
You can tell me every birdsong that reminds you of your 6th birthday
I will show you how the raspberry plants are already growing 
From the soft mulch of a dead oak
 
The river will pull us to it in an embrace,
Will guide our bodies down into the mud
Into the decaying leaves and stones
Will show us the footprints of a thousand thirsty beings 
That have come to the river bank and
Bowed their heads in prayer
Which is to say: 
Have drunk from its body
 
Every plant will be in season then, 
Because it will be every season when we visit
We will toss pebbles down the iced corridor of the river
We will splash water across our furnace faces to relieve the summer heat
 
Our great grandmothers will cup our cheeks in their weathered hands, 
Will wipe dirt from our cheekbones 
With the whorls of their fingerprints 
(The inner rings of ancient trees)
They will tell us not to be scared 
Because their touch on our faces--
Even in times like these--
Can do us no harm
 
They will make us tea from pine needles
And we will show them Twitter on our phones
How, together, we are working to (re)learn their language 
Across miles of forests and lakes
And imposed country borders
We will show them we have friends that live across oceans
 
They forgive us for yet feeling lonely
When we have been given gifts like these
They will point to our phones
To the small beings emerging green from the earth
To the footprints of her/our descendants who will ask us to make them tea
Who we are having tea with, even now
Who will ask us: Please, make sure the river is here when we arrive. 
Protect it for us. So we can visit you here on the bank.
So we can press our feet into the footprints you left behind.
 
Your ancestors will tell you that you are not alone
So will the maple trees, their veins pulsing with their bloodsap sign of spring
So will the cotton fibers woven to make your clothes--
That even now are embracing you 
(Ask them what the sun feels like where they first breached the soil
They will tell you if you listen)
 
When loneliness creeps upon you
The river will be there to remind you 
Of the truth
I know that’s where I’ll be--
With my mouth full of summer blueberries, 
Legs sunken knee-deep in the bank and
Touching
Centuries

Zoë Johnson is a queer non-binary writer living mid-Michigan. They are an enrolled member of the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians and a creative writing MFA candidate at the Institute of American Indian Arts. Their fiction has been shortlisted for PRISM International's 2019 Jacob Zilber Prize for Short Fiction and been a finalist for the 2018 Lascaux Review Prize in Short Fiction. Work of theirs has been published by PULP Literature, Plentitude Magazine, Sonora Review Online, and been anthologized in the Lascaux Prize Anthology Vol. 6, and Public Poetry's 2019 contest finalists anthology ENOUGH. Their work is forthcoming bilingually in The Polyglot #6, and as part of the second edition of Trans Bodies, Trans Selves from Oxford University Press. When not writing, Zoë spends their time doting on their cat Strawberry, learning to speak their tribal language of Anishinaabemowin, and getting far too invested in podcasts.
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