I've started two different projects about my experiences in Native American cultures. White Girl Can't Fancy Dance tends to reflect what it is like for me as a white person in a culture that isn't inherently mine. Smudge Patterns tends to include everything else, and also has poems that are connected to this part of my life in not-so-obvious ways. More on that in later poems. Some work floats between both projects, because you can't really separate the everyday from the spiritual. I'm not sure what will become of either project. Maybe they will stay separate, maybe they will melt together, or maybe something completely new will be born from them. This poem has been revised so many times it barely resembles its original. It started as a part of White Girl Can't Fancy Dance, but I recently found it in a folder for Smudge Patterns. As I'm cursed with believing I'll remember details that I never do, I have no idea why it was in that folder, but I'm tagging it in both projects for now.
©Erin Croley, photo from morgueFile by taliesin
| brass beads and neon green I. brass beads are cold against my neck in the morning, startling memories-- the dusty heat of a late Oklahoma summer powwow afternoon. hair in two braids, down to my waist. a screen-printed, I’m a Pepper tee-shirt, and white-piped shorts, now brown. dad sells his chokers. stands behind the three by three table, as if they should be encased in glass. beautifully crafted in authentic hand-carved bone, leather tanned the old way, and sinew i helped beeswax… my job on the tall stool next to his… feet dangling, to keep hands from smudging brass beads. i beg money from my parents, like the other we’re-staying-out-of-your-way kids for a squirt gun, mine neon green. we chase each other around the fairgrounds, use complete strangers as body shields, shooting between their legs, and never look up far enough to recognize approval or disgust. when we tire of cowboys and indians, i try to sell my sidearm back to the vendor, but she is a big woman with a hard face. i stand stone still, eyes wide, head tilted back slightly, while two large nostrils say no. II. blood drips through his fingers and down his side as he limps along the gravel road encircling the fairgrounds. shirtless sweat mixing the dusty wound down to dirty jeans and white tennis shoes, waiting for a car to start, to pick him up, to carry him to the hospital and away from whatever caused the knife to slip in. i hope it was more than the drunken night, or the 49 songs, or the white girl with neon green pretending the failed heroine, pretending life outside this celebration didn’t exist, and that dad behind me, hands on my shoulders, can keep me here after morning breaks. ©Erin Croley |
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