Love Song to the Alpacas of Solomon Lane
BY KENZIE ALLEN
You know nothing of stars.
There is a low black river bordering the field,
and a sturdy little fence you arch across
with your precious skull and your ludicrous eyelashes
should a child approach with carrots or careless hands.
You don’t know the ocean, or the end of that road;
the bubbling cloud of ash thrown up by dirty bombs;
what a human can do to another human
or to anything else, really, that gets in its way;
the piles of glittering shards left over
from the jeweler’s perfect cut.
You don’t know the way they call us
gone, don’t know life as illegal.
You’ve no concept of the delicacy of a vein,
which countries’ lost water sends alfalfa to your bin.
If there is a hum overhead, some cold flying spider
crowned in a tiny green light and a single, relentless eye—
you need nothing of coordinates, demographics,
the outline of a district or illusion of safety,
just shears at the right time, a firm hand, a soft voice,
carrots, someone on the other end of a shovel.
The dense shag of your shoulders won’t hold
the heat of this city. How many years until you are gone;
your pen a water feature in another speculative neighborhood
with houses all bricked in the French style
starting at only one-point-five million and
I look for you driving lonely the nights I come back to Texas
as though from here is belonging.
Your jaws work idle, your little hooves muffle in dust.
Would that I could have lived happy in your oblivion,
not seen airplanes and mistaken them for comets,
not seen so much I learned to want or fear—
but teach me, sweet soft-lipped faces, sweet big dark eyes,
how to settle my restless legs beneath me,
to be quieted for what I can have.
Low on the horizon, that flickering light—
I know it’s not a supernova. A satellite will do.
In Which I Become (Earth Mother)
BY KENZIE ALLEN
Who did you believe you were
when you spread your hands? Said
I come in good tidings, but even
your mouth tripped, sunk a shovel
into the skin of my belly,
carved and fractured and tore
land from my every land.
Call me sage woman,
palette and canvas,
your planetary, primordial home.
Call me always quaking
into rooms that are not ready,
the good curtains set beside the sill
and everyone’s gone quiet,
everyone’s looking for the source.
You say you admire the way I kiss
sky, how I forge each shining horizon
toward which you sailed or called
destiny. You long to conquer me,
when all I did was nurture you.
You ask me to provide, you ask
for my deepest core, my iron ore
and uranium, you demand to mine
my innards, my caves, my sanctum.
You beg me to bless you
with jewels, black gold, copper
veins—you force me to split wide open.
You insist I belong to none but you,
say my justice is too costly,
must wait until the end of this
next silver seam. Tell me what’s valuable
in all my life, tell me what’s better
if not this soil, the way the land forms
to the balled fist, all spiked ridges now
when pressed or curled in the palm.
Clutch it hard enough, it will even hold
that which marks you incarcerable,
the loops and whorls, the lifeline’s crevice.
Hold it longer, let the dermis be the thing to break,
years and years and years, for she will defy you,
no matter how you try to keep her.
Elegy Against Elegy
BY KENZIE ALLEN
What I’ve given up has walked my path
alongside me, marking time; footfall: drumbeat.
We say He’s walked on, far beyond death,
and we wish him good spirits, good journey.
When I walk on,
let me walk on.
…
This is an elegy against elegy,
a song against the song of our demise.
Let go the need for ghosts as memory
behind glass, quicksilvered—
remembered, even standing before you—
we are not dead and gone.
This is an elegy against lamentation,
which we know will succeed only by its nature,
where what’s lost can be lost again
and never returned, not in the light of day,
not in the light you take with you.
Those who have left me
have left me so much.
They are walking on.
…
I walk among all our relations—
the hooved ones, and the flying ones,
and the ones who swim
into cool, deep waters, and the ones who
blanket the grasses in their multitudes,
who carry their children’s children
even in the womb of their mothers.
I walk among the garden
where our sisters’ fruits nourish us.
They wrap their arms around any trellis
or stand straight and tall, or creep along
the ground with their gourds, their treasures,
which last months and months in the bitter cold.
…
Marvel at this miracle:
petroglyphs survive
thousands of years of weather,
and point the way past
dangerous rapids,
painted water monster
as more than story.
A teaching:
extinction is not an Indigenous word.
This story goes on.
…
Though he may crackle the ground
in his growing regard, I walk easy
under brother sun’s light.
He crosses oceans,
kisses each edge of sky,
endless.
As grandmother moon
casts the world in silver,
she shapes every shoreline
as she goes along.
I welcome her into my body.
…
I leave out a plate for my ancestors.
I ask their advice in dreams.
Once, my grandmother came to me and said,
in a voice warm and alive:
What will you give back?
…
You mourn her passing long before she’s gone,
she who raised you up from her own
clay and loam, her skirts cover your fields
in green pastures. She is still here to be loved,
her song as gentle, enduring
wind, carrying each seed
to new beginnings.
…
This is an elegy against elegy.
This is a celebration.
Somewhere in a field
the bones dropped lightly to earth
after every rainfall.
The sweetgrass bloomed for miles.
