But could not of it. But of it could not.

I was given a journey that let shadows change the presence
of the crib. Of memory in the remembering of the memory
of the act of being.

The struggle of thought. The process of it there.

A variant.

Others of it did.

The history of it came at night. To hear what the thought
of it was. What it thought what it was. In the thought of
what it was was the thought of it.

So much for the concrete of it. To be there for the
understanding.

But this of it was.

Of the day I will not belong if not dreamed.

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

What can I say?

I don’t have native language. I don’t have documentation.
My great-grandfather is not on the Dawes Rolls. He
fled Indian Territory because he was in trouble. He spent
his life hiding in northern Arkansas. I have the same
tendencies.
What is there in history but a shape of being? A language
structure that is place with its multiple meanings of places
within place.
I translate without original language. I translate the traces
of the process of original thought. Something of what
other says.

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 .

Gourd Dance

It is memory over there by that place. Memory that
remembers before remembering. The family of my father
dislodged. The memory of my mother’s parents displaced
over them as marbles moving on a board of Chinese
checkers.
Or wind moving in the shocks of corn. A gourd dance
found there. Before the farm. Or trails of dust behind stars
traveling. Variants of headlights on the old dirt road to
follow.

And the gauze curtains through which the form of
remembering came. Through which it must pass for the
memory of the remembering to come. A shifting to
another to say what was not said. Of them was running
more than going. A gourd dance. A blowgun on its mark.

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 .

Was not anything made that was made — John 1:3

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 .

This is from where I was.

It is another way to write—capturing old thought that
roams of its own into a form not its own. I am driving
and there it comes—a passage of the old world reporting.
A visage of the word-thought order under the surface
of thinking. It bleeds through at times when I’m not
expecting it. I hear it in the substructure of thought. It

is primal in intent. I still have resentment toward grade-
school teachers who stripped the knottiness of thought

with their rules of grammar. I want to say, rudeness of
grammar. My rebellion is saying it as it was said. My
rebellion is this work.

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 .