Far Enough Byrdie Lee Howell Langon self-published Utah and the Early Black Settlers, a short book about her life and the Black community in Salt Lake City, Utah, and was honored with these words by her Bethel AME pastor, Jerry Ford, in 1969: We say we love you not only for what you are but for what you are when we are with you we love you for putting your hand into our heaped-up hearts and passing over all the frivolous and weak things that you cannot help but see there and drawing out all the beautiful things that many have not looked far enough to find Covered Wagon as Spaceship Standing unseen in the little bluestem, curious and not quite used to living, I consider whether it's aliens that brought Black folks to the canyons, valley. Standing in the great evaporation of a lake, holy dandelion for eyes, full and white and searching the landscape for understanding: how do you come to be where there are no others, except science fiction? I am a child feeling extraterrestrial; whose history, untold, is not enough. Anyway, it begins with abduction UFO, for Instance When the hole between blue spruce widens and twists into a cosmos when the wild lilac and campfire atomize and night hangs their smokes across its belly when in the clearing you are certain you are not lonelier but there is a lifting in you where other knowing rises too and divides you from the bone in your feet to the fat round your heart and leaves you surrounded by your own breath you emerge from and watch vanish and think the night ate it ate your knowing and how could anyone know any more you might as well look out into the clouds of long pine that hang brambled and orange in branches you listen for howling but none comes North Node According to her, I appeared to my mother in an in utero vision and told her my name. Before I chose my mother, all day long I ran my fingertips along the slick backs of cutthroat trout and gathered water from Millcreek into a sapphire pail. I waited for her. In the distance, there was a blue bull surrounded by lilies. She loves me, so she bore me underwater. IÕm here to learn a lesson. I spent my other lives in the Nevada desert, where I only did what felt good. What could that mean? I reconcile the pleasure in lying naked on the hot sand of the Mojave, watching the braided muscles in a horseÕs hind legs with the ocean nowhere, a frying chest on the hood of an idle car. So comes a lesson, IÕm here to cut the scorpion from my throat. Even though it has dragged me through sweet darkness and time. Even now, in the stillness of home, in love and full of wine, it wraps its eight legs around me. Even through the lilies, it sets its many eyes on me and, suddenly, longing Like a Suggestion The antelope start dying, of all places, on Antelope Island. Our two greyhounds startle in their sleep and walk together toward the window. I've heard wolves are hunting bison, even though it's spring and there are easier things to kill. Cowbirds abandon wooden fences. They say Atlantic salmon haven't returned to their cribs of fresh water. The cat stands still before an open door to the house. I move to put my hand behind her ear and she bolts. I Have Learned to Define a Field as a Space between Mountains If I remember a field where I stroked the velvety hound's-tongue and cracked its purple mouth from stem and it is not a memory, then what were the limits of the field? Sometimes we are driving south toward Zion in a crowded truck with my mother and we pass the same red wildflowers until someone says, ÒIndian paintbrush, Rio, havenÕt you seen them before?Ó And, have I? Other times I pose in front of giant flor de maga, its soft petal saucers larger than my head. My father fixes one behind my ear and says something in Eyeri but for what photograph? I am a conjoined hibiscus-headed twin, except IÕm local. I braid the long hair of the willow and like a young warrior I swing across the canal bed by the braid. By the rivers of Babylon we sat down and wept when we remembered Zion. There on the willow trees, we hung our harps. How could we sing the LordÕs song in a foreign land? I read this once in Sunday school, tripping on it. In any field I am certain I can be seen by someone. How couldnÕt I? When IÕm blood-divided one hundred ways, when I pray to the God called DO NOT BOARD THE SHIP, when IÕm protected by so many masters of the vine. They must be in here somewhere? They must see me this far into the desert, it canÕt be that I am alone here. I search behind the cattails, I scramble the wood. Has it gotten darker? A child and all I can see are houses. Every house is a rambler with a plastic snake full of sand or a well that isnÕt really a well. Every house is on a street named after the Ute tribes. IÕm in Ute Country, in the field to fly a cheap kite, but it gets caught in pine sap. I walk home but not without pocketfuls. The Idea of Ancestry After Etheridge Knight I am in a sweet place standing in Millcreek on a road in its canyon and this sweet place has also been the sweet place of my people I am staring into the water my grandmother fished with a rod and a line I am standing near the head of a timber trail felled by grandfather's grandfather I am listening to the aspen its green coins singing in the wind and I know it sang just like this for them I am standing right at the center of its singing the same sound heard by black bears or the calf of a moose lying even sweeter in the yarrow showing we can be dark and shining in wildflower I know this timber was once a house my mother's grandmother's mother's hammer in hand everything throttling backward toward me through time a timber roof that has kept the frost from coming in and stinging my babies we made that for ourselves I consider choosing there are times when it is a joy to remember I like to think about my people drinking fresh buttermilk from the chosen farms of their other people all of us gazing back at the house framed by our future knowing filling up on fresh tomatoes and after maybe lying like the silk calf in the deerwood and the aster and never-ending Driving at Night For Laquan McDonald I think it's quails lining the road, but it's fallen birchwood. What look like white clouds in a grassy basin, sprinklers. I mistake the woman walking her retriever for a pair of fawns. Could-be animals. Unexplained weather. Maybe they see us that way. Disappointed, the closer they get. Not quite ready to let it go. I'm Forced to Imagine There Are Two of Me Here To fit in we practice not dancing I pull her hair against our head and burn the water out she sucks in the lip of our belly I call her Rio say Rio remind them of our one white grandmother do what it takes to make them think we are like them Because it is a risk to want us we close the bedroom door she reaches under the blanket It's just me Rio and The Dark does she part my legs or The Dark's I spit into our hand and touch her Sometimes she bites our lips to make them smaller we refuse to dance we do what it takes I let her drive Little Cottonwood Canyon It is night we hit a deer breath from its nostrils clouds the windshield It feels like there could be more of us somewhere she opens the car doors we show each other mercy take the same bite of a cracked rib blood from her mouth I move to kiss the animal I learn to shoot a bow It is no River Jordan that flows here between the railroad tracks and the back porch. It's a canal. Not unlike my mother: low as it want to be and fullest when it rains. Existing for however long without a name, and singing under a timber bridge that we built. We built that. Isn't that our story? To be denied the beginning. I cross the bridge to shoot a sapling bow my grandfather has carved. He helps me aim into cardboard flats stacked against the willow. I guess this is where I am Orion. With two birth stories. In one story I come from a sea god with the forest as my mother, and in the other, I have no mother at all Partum Just as close to living as you are to disappearing knowing my limits you locate the tender spots without. To be batter and rind maybe I've hidden my feral self even though I was certain I was wild I'm now certain it was vanity here I pace cut open drinking thistle and yolk expecting nothing determined to live you Little God, Oldest Friend who summons milk and hair from the follicle who moves my teeth and makes me bleed it is not a joy but joyful to have been brought this close to the earth haven't we touched hands before? in the bright red towns of my youth in Loa or Escalante where I thought we were only passing through was it you at the counter serving me sarsaparilla in a cool brown bottle, remembering me? Marion's 1982 Chevrolet Citation If I board her it means pulling open her heavy sails the steel that gravity throws shut on my calves good thing I am quick to leave She must be virtuous because there is nothing hidden in her going not the power in her closing doors nor the ignition and its triumphant refrain even idle, she disrupts she rests in the cool shade of a basketball hoop I stare from my parents' living room window how the mulberry tree wreaks its havoc on the driveway all my friends call her The Killing Machine how else could she have lived this long and look so good Marion says it's like she's been asleep for me I am six days from my sixteenth birthday I cover her hatchback in cosmic fish and press my foot down where do I go I wonder without them the chrome of the dashboard mirrors the Millcreek sun I see myself in fraction my wristwatch as I pull the radio knob eyebrow cocked as I adjust her mirrors A Class Distinction I start to say Once, I left the mountains, the Wasatch and Oquirrh talking aloud I question the spelling in my head I've never been sure It's possible I wasn't born from mountains at all but a valley. What is lower than a valley? Once, I left the strip malls, I grew up in a long drive-thru line sipping diet cola from a bent straw when I talk about mountains I am being romantic about the valley I worry you'll unmask me I've always been that way lying just a little on the Berber carpet squashing summer ants the TV telling me everything Salt This is the place! Space is the place. -Brigham Young -Sun Ra I slip the silksac of my body and walk out onto the flats the air a machine sucking earth into fragments of white absorbing heat finding me I kneel at the shore I reach into the lake it is red as a halt I reach into the wound of it I drag out its string of bones and now I am two times the dark I crush skeletons of artemia underfoot I eat eggs in stasis the dead lake idles the city surrounds what weapons we are I fold the net of my shadow I hold it as evidence Emancipation Queen "Emancipation Queen" was a historically Black beauty pageant in Utah. It's true that beauty can be a tool dually wielded robin's egg who would know come from a red- breasted bird taffeta gown named for what the body made its blue but not the maker or the blue from which come the robin is that emancipation to leave beauty behind a Black girl on a stage inside the egg of a robin a Black girl who is a robin repeating the question As Cain Until 1978, Mormons maintained that in a spiritual "preexistence," Blacks were neutral bystanders when other spirits chose sides during a fight between God and Lucifer. For that failure of courage, they were condemned to become the accursed descendants of Cain. I think of the earth that drank Abel's blood as I uproot foxtail from the garden. Earth, not passive, but cursed by God, having accepted death, and maybe, even, hoped to grow from it. And Cain said to Abel, "Let us go to the field." I cut my own thumb on a weed. I carry out a strict ritual of healing: cold hose water and then most Holy: mouth. Tell me, what mark has God given me? I am paraphrasing here when I say God told Cain to rule over his own longing or else restless wanderer shall he be on earth. First curse, then blessing. God's always changing his mind about us To Salt Lake, Letter Regarding Genealogy After Charles Olson No shore no shore backed against a paradox of water where snow halts in valleys and we drink what melts, I, risen from one break in the endless salt flat. I have had to build. O! how I have built for you! See how I have come, Salt Lake, with my thousand faces of the void! My face night with no stars, my face waves in night sea. I was born to work. My mother, crow-headed goddess, called me dust and trusted I'd become. I changed for you! I became a quarry in Big Cottonwood. Later, I was born in uniform and carried a pickax in my throat. I stole the mountain's sandstone and it wasn't good enough so I took its quartz instead and told you "pray by it." I, Guard-thing of the White city. How would you pray without me! I was born with a sore head from a perm and swaddled in pages from The Good Book. I was a decoy. I pretended not to know my many names. I did the work of believing with you. I was born on swamp property the woman who bore me was an animal. Excerpted from Golden Ax by Rio Cortez All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
