
The Dakota Access Pipeline protests dominate the news, and the images that accompany these news stories are striking and vivid. Hence the inspiration for this poem, published in Tuck Magazine:
The Woman in the
Ring
was clearly celebrating
something.
Life. Or the abdication of
care.
To my eight year old
eyes
she was glorious, a
rainbow
swathed in chieftain
feathers,
a glistening Santa Fe
turquoise
nestled in the silver
filigree
of her throat’s dusky
hollow.
When she laughed her bright teeth
moonbeamed from her brown mouth but
my mama said I must be dreaming.
When she swirled her frayed skirts
frolicked with her shining calves but
my mama said it was time to grow up.
When she beckoned with a crooked finger
cracked long ago by the rage of a large man
my mama said stop yo’ nonsense now
I was in thrall to the
cottony dread-
locks snaking down her bony back
wrapped in a gleaming
band of sun-
shine, to the glint of gold
peeping between
her tinseled toe-
nails, and I never noticed
the blackened fissures
of her cracked heel, or her
scabby pale palm,
or our matching meta-
skin.