Rose quartz Poems

From the Upper Skagit and Nooksack Indian Tribes and author of the well-regarded memoir Red, LaPointe opens her plangent first collection with poems assaying language as a means of mending a self splintered between cultures ("teach me a word/ better than survivor"), then builds like a storm to bright, colliding lines capturing that duality and its price. "I learned to sever head from heart/ dunked my head beneath water/ that was no longer there," she says as she travels through a hardened coming of age (when she "learns loneliness"), male violence ("The men in cars have changed into wolves"), and white oppression (the "weight and meat and muscle" pressing against her comes from a Viking with "yellow hair falling"). She longs for escape ("I am looking for something other than the glow of headlights"), yet knows she's misplaced a part of herself ("trapped…up…and emptied…into a bell jar") and indeed her very sense of identity ("the wool blankets weren't/ good enough// for me to be a real/ Indian"). Fairytale imagery pervades, from Hansel and Gretel to Snow White, but LaPointe has also found her own, closer-to-home rituals for protection. VERDICT A beautifully rendered sense of someone blown to bits by social and cultural injustices and still in the remaking.--Barbara Hoffert

ROSE RED I woke in the glass coffin of my bedroom. I watched the color go: first the fingertips, then the white traveling up my arm's length. Both legs, thighs. The ribcage and neck. Lips the color of blood drained slow. Bone lit. No glow of rose tinted cheeks. I experimented with rouge, dyes and paint. I covered myself in rubies, but beneath the glimmer was skin as white as snow. Ice cold. Frozen over. This medication, they said, keep taking it. For the pain. *** OBSCURIAL AND OTHER SPELLS FOR SURVIVAL   a mother and a girl a curl in the backseat bent mountains of her knees against the rushing of cedar trees little fingers go from glass to a wound beneath the belly she is checking to see if she is still intact are the guts here the liver the stomach the heart   or is she in pieces a thing taken apart she searches in the back of a Buick for a lost thing a firework turned inside out blackening the car in a cloud of gunpowder and smoke   a shadow mass of soot needles sends the car a-spin ditchward throws the girl ten feet from the crumpled metal of what used to be the backseat   it begins with an accident a girl wakes on the forest floor makes her way to the road to find her mother taking inventory of the wreckage shaking her head over an upside down engine   but the look on her mother's face upon that charcoal black amassing above her little girl and gasping not realizing she had taken two steps back   so the girl learns loneliness and how to climb trees escape the thing that held like a storm to her insides   weave cedar ropes in the hopes of holding it in bind the self to nurse logs for entire moon cycles   but in the dark of a gymnasium with a boy's hands clasped at her waist she sways back and forth to Boyz to Men   again   a fire that eats itself back to blackness blacks out the dancefloor the boy and the bathroom stall she falls into puking tar into the toilet   when she thought to release it neither scissors nor seam ripper would sever it if Peter Pan could somehow escape his shadow why not her but the darkness clung harder she learned to like the taste of it ate it everyday back into the bloodstream   on her wedding night she snatched it trapped it up inside a plastic bag and emptied it into a bell jar the mantle placed upon her the new home   there they watched the thing move and spin caught within glass walls an apparition lost without the host   it begins with dishes with bags of peaches from the fruit stand paint samples and leaves raked baked goods red velvet cakes   a hairline fracture over time cracks even the foundation   and when he came home there was nothing left save a small bit of fabric from her dress   feathering   into ash  *** THE LOST BOYS   Drink this and be one of us my brother passed his bottle of wine to me tried to offer life eternal he was always trying to fix things   but this highway is haunted the coast and its ghosts remind me that I am broken   my brother has become something immortal and he didn't even have to die first his thirst for a better life turned him into darkness   and my mother tried to grieve but it is hard to mourn the living   so I tell her he is dead because gone is better than missing gone is a ghost you can blow out the candle for   it is my duty to take him apart to burn the letters rip down the flyers drive the stake through his heart   because you cannot hang posters for lost children pretending they will one day come home because at some point you realize the pictures were for you   so for her I have become a vampire hunter armed with garlic and holy water but the truth is I can't do it the truth is behind fangs I still see the lost boy who used to be my brother   so when he offered the wine that was his blood I took a swallow tried to follow him in shadow   but I remembered my promise not to become a daughter missing had to quit the ritual halfway and watch my brother say hello to the night and fight alone   in Santa Cruz I cry into my beloved's hands and abandon immortality and he knows how hard this is for me knows my capacity for vanishing   so I anchor myself to him and watch the waves return to shore I whisper a spell of protection for my brother   for all the lost boys who came before *** HALF MOON BAY   Half Indian an old woman laughs I must take after a white father because I can           pass   they say the tribes lived along the coast all along San Francisco Bay   driving alongside waves I feel alone feel home drift away   the moon hooks the sky and I drive trying to catch it between my fingers a crescent of white a fight still present   Garbage Indians the old woman told me that's what we called them growing up in Monterey   the dump was on their reservation because isn't it always and I bite my tongue until it bleeds until I quiet the anger in me   and I'll wait until I leave Half Moon Bay to scream into my fist and say all the things we are not supposed to say   to the people who are older than us Excerpted from Rose Quartz: Poems by Sasha taqwsəblu LaPointe All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. 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