A cat on the edge of water. A group of fish called school. What I was was broken from the disparate pieces fishing in the river. The lake. The stream of being. My brother caught a fish. It was early in the fish-catching program they forwarded. What is there is not of it now. But a vehicle for travel. Separated in parts as fish in the water. Most of them gone or swimming as fish swim together and apart in the river. The strike of old ways. Wave-lines on the flat rock by the shore. The Lakota believe their language was created when their people were—FaceBook Native Hope 3/31/17. It was the same on the trail I was there after. I had to speak from different places in different ways to find where it scattered. Waiting from where I was. I could follow where they knew I was. It’s still the light by my fingers moving.
This selection comes from the chapbook, It Was Over There By That Place, available from The Atlas Review. Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Sarah Clark .
Diane Glancy is professor emerita at Macalester College. Her latest books are Fort Marion Prisoners and the Trauma of Native Education (creative nonfiction), University of Nebraska Press, 2014, and Report to the Department of the Interior (poetry), University of New Mexico Press. 2015. in 2016-17 Wipf & Stock has published several books including Mary Queen of Bees (novella), The Servitude of Love (short stories) and The Collector of Bodies, Concern for Syria and the Middle East (poems).
Sarah Clark is a disabled non-binary Nanticoke editor, writer, and cultural consultant. They are Editor-in-Chief and Poetry Editor at Anomaly (www.anmly.org), Co-Editor of the Bettering American Poetry series (www.betteringamericanpoetry.com) and The Queer Movement Anthology (Seagull Books, 2021), a reader at The Atlas Review and Doubleback Books, and an Editorial Board member at Sundress Press. She curated Anomaly‘s GLITTERBRAIN folio (http://anmly.org/ap25-glitterbrain/) and a folio on Indigenous & Decolonial Futures & Futurisms (http://anmly.org/ap-27-indigenous-futures/), edited Drunken Boat’s folios on Sound Art, “Desire & Interaction,” and a collection of global indigenous art and literature, “First Peoples, Plural.” They were co-editor of Apogee Journal‘s #NoDAPL #Still Here folio, and co-edited Apogee Journal‘s series “WE OUTLAST EMPIRE,” of work against imperialism, and “Place[meant]“, on place and meaning, and is a former Executive Board member at VIDA. Sarah freelances, and has worked with a number of literary and arts publications and organizations. www.twitter.com/petitobjetb
