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Allison Adelle Hedge Coke has been an invitational performer in
international poetry festivals in Medellin, Colombia, Venezuela, Argentina,
Canada, and Jordan and foreign professional in poetry and writing for
Shandong University in Wei Hai, China. She is a Weymouth Center for the
Arts and Humanities, MacDowell Colony for Artists, Black Earth Institute
Think Tank, Hawthornden Castle, and Center for Great Plains Research
Fellow, is a former National Endowment for the Humanities Distinguished
Visiting Professor at Hartwick College, and holds the Distinguished Paul W.
Reynolds and Clarice Kingston Reynolds Endowed Chair in Poetry as an
Associate Professor of Poetry and Writing at the University of Nebraska,
Kearney, where she directs the Reynolds Reading Series and Sandhill Crane
Migration Tribute Retreat. She is core faculty in the University of
Nebraska MFA Program and Faulty of the MFA Intensive Program at University
of California, Palm Desert, and a 2008 Paul Hanly Furfey Endowed Lecturer. Her books include: Dog Road Woman, American Book Award, Coffee House Press, 1997; The Year of the Rat, chapbook, Grimes Press, 2000; Rock Ghost, Willow, Deer, AIROS Book-of-the-Month, University of Nebraska Press, 2004; Off-Season City Pipe, Wordcraft Writer of the Year for Poetry, Coffee House Press, 2005; Blood Run, Wordcraft Writer of the Year for Poetry, Salt Publications, UK 2006-US 2007; To Topos Ahani: Indigenous American Poetry, Journal Issue of the Year Award (ed.), Oregon State University, 2007; and
Effigies, (ed.), Salt Publications, 2009. She has edited five other volumes. Her long poem "The Year of the Rat" is currently being made into a ballet through collaboration with Brent Michael Davids, Mohican Composer. Recent literary publications include Connecticut Review, Prometeo Memories, Akashic Books, and Black Renaissance Noire. Recent photography publications include Connecticut Review, Future Earth Magazine, and Digital Poetics. She has also authored a full-length play Icicles, numerous monologues, and has worked in theater, television, radio, and film. A. A. Hedge Coke has been awarded several state and regional artistic and literary grants,
fellowships, and state representational tours; multiple excellence in
teaching awards (including the King Chavez Parks Faculty Award); a Sioux
Falls Mayor's Award for Literary Excellence; a National Mentor of the Year
Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers Award; has served on
several state, grassroots community, and national boards in the arts, as a
writer in the schools in several states, and has held an community advocate
position on a city housing board. She additionally served as a Delegate in
the United Nations Women in Peacemaking Conference at the Joan B. Kroc
Center for Peace and Justice and as a United Nations Presenting Speaker
(with James Thomas Stevens, Mohawk Poet), a Facilitator and Speaker
Nominator for the only Indigenous Literature Panel of the Indigenous
Peoples Human Rights Forum of the United Nations. For many years, she has
worked with incarcerated and underserved Indigenous youth and youth of
color mentorship programs and served as a court official in Indian youth
advocacy and CASA. Hedge Coke has edited five additional collections and is
editing two book series of emerging Indigenous writing (for Red Hen Press
and Salt Publications). She is Huron and Cherokee descent, French Canadian
and Portuguese descent, and came of age cropping tobacco and working in
factories.
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| When The Animals Leave This Place |
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English version
When The Animals Leave This Place
For Bob Hedge Coke
Underneath ice caps, glacial peaks
deer, elk, vixen begin to ascend.
Wild creatures camouflaged as
waves and waves receding
from plains pulling
upward slopes and snow dusted mountains.
On spotted and clearcut hills robbed of fir,
high above wheat-tapestried valleys, flood plains
up where head waters reside.
Droplets pound, listen.
Hoofed and pawed mammals
pawing and hoofing themselves up, up.
Along rivers dammed by chocolate beavers,
trailed by salamanders-mud puppies.
Plunging through currents,
above concrete and steel man-made barriers
these populations of forests flee
in such frenzy, popping splash dance,
pillaging cattail zones, lashing lily pads—
the breath of life in muddy ponds and still lakes.
Liquid beads slide on windshield glass
along cracked and shattered pane,
spider-like with webs and prisms.
Look, there, the rainbow
touched the ground both ends down.
Full arch, seven colors showered, heed
what the indigenous know,
why long ago they said people didn’t belong here,
that this land was meant to be wet with waters
not fertile to crops and domestic grazing.
The old ones said,
When the animals leave this place
the waters will come again.
This power is beyond the strength of man.
The river will return with its greatest force.
No one can stop her.
She was meant to be this way.
The rainbow tied with red and green like
that on petal rose, though only momentarily.
Colors disappear like print photograph fading.
They mix with dark grey surrounding.
A flurry of fowl follow
like strands, maidenhair falls,
from blackened clouds above
swarming inward
covering the basin and raising sky.
Darkness hangs over
the hills appear as black water crests,
blackness varying shades.
The sun is somewhere farther than the farthest ridge.
Main gravel crossroads and back back roads
slicken to mud, clay.
Turtles creep along rising banks, snapping jowls.
Frogs chug throaty songs.
The frogs only part of immense choir
heralding the downpour, the falling oceans.
Over the train trestle and suspension bridge with
current so slick everything slides off in sheets.
Among rotten stumps in dark bass ponds,
catfish reel in fins and crawl,
walking whiskers to higher waters.
Waters above and below
the choir calling it forth.
Brightly plumed jays and dull brown-headed cowbirds
fly as if hung in one place like pinwheels.
They dance toward the rain crest,
the approaching storm
beckoning, inviting, summoning.
A single sparrow sings the stroke of rain
past the strength of sunlight.
The frog chorus sings refrain,
melody drumming thunder,
evoked by beasts and water creatures wanting their homes.
Wanting to return to clearings and streams where
white birch woods rise and tower over
and quaking aspen stand against
dark, dark veils-sheeting rains crossing
pasture, meadow, mountain.
Sounds erupt.
Gathering clouds converge, push,
pull, push, pull forcing lightning
back and forth shaping
windy, sculptured swans, mallard ducks, and giants
from stratocumulus media.
As if they are a living cloud chamber,
As if they exist only in the heavens.
Air swells with dampness.
It has begun.
Reprinted with permission From Blood Run, Salt Publications, 2006.
Editor's Choice, Abiko Quarterly, Cid Corman. |
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| #4 Southwest Chief/LA Central |
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English
version
#4 Southwest Chief/LA Central
For Derya and Heid
The sheen of incandescent lamppost light travels this rail,
up ahead the Conductor
reminds us, if there’s anything
we can do to make your trip worthless just let us know
and no one cracks a smile.
This Amtrak car glides between
concrete pillars wrapped with steel for quake protection.
Projects plastered in graffiti by day now sink into 9: 00 p.m.
comfortable—
this time of night you’d think they were condos
if you rode this rail for the first time.
What I see is concertina riding chain link fence tops—
as if there is an escape attempt due any moment.
Then, somehow, I see myself in the window. Not a reflection
but an actual replica looking back at me and at the glare,
over further than a bounce of light could flash, where
planes coming in to land look like falling stars,
and I’m taking my mother to the asylum in my memory.
I can still hear her saying, bad, bad girl and look
at the pretty stars and Christmas lights sometime late July.
L.A. River on my left, tonight there’s water more than trickle down.
Along the concrete banks where someone wrote out: RECKLESS
a concrete mixer is parked right by the river and rail,
and one single truck has its lights on bright.
By morning, jump-starts will cardiac it back to life.
My gut aches. The whole world’s in a window at Fullerton and
through arches, past electric globes, it spins
high over a Pepsi machine on the floor far below.
Bad, bad girl. Look at the pretty stars and Christmas lights.
Reprinted with permission from Off-Season City Pipe,
Coffee House Press, 2005. Original Magazine Publication
in The Santa Barbara Review.
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English
version
The Change
For The Sharecropper I Left Behind in '79
Thirteen years ago, before bulk barns and
fifth gear diesel tractors, we rode royal blue tractors with
tool boxes big enough to hold a six pack on ice.
In the one hundred, fifteen degree summer
heat with air so thick with moisture
you drink as you breathe.
Before the year dusters sprayed
Malathion over our clustered bodies, perspiring
while we primed bottom lugs,
those ground level leaves of tobacco,
and it clung to us with black tar so sticky we rolled
eight inch balls off our arms at night and
Cloroxed our clothes for hours and hours.
Before we were poisoned and
the hospital thought we had been burned in fires,
at least to the third degree,
when the raw, oozing, hives that
covered ninety-eight percent of our bodies
from the sprays ordered by the FDA
and spread by landowners,
before anyone had seen
automated machines that top and prime.
While we topped the lavender
blooms of many tiny flowers
gathered into one, gorgeous.
By grasping hold below the petals
with our bare, calloused, hands
and twisting downward, quick, hard,
only one time, snapped them off.
Before edgers and herbicides took
what they call weeds,
when we walked for days
through thirty acres and
chopped them out with hoes.
Hoes, made long before from wood and steel
and sometimes (even longer ago)
from wood and deer scapula.
Before the bulk primers came
and we primed all the leaves by hand,
stooped over at the waist for the
lower ones and through the season
gradually rising higher until we stood
and worked simultaneously,
as married to the fields as we were to each other,
carrying up to fifty pounds of fresh
leaves under each arm and sewing them onto
sticks four feet long on a looper
under the shade of a tin-roofed barn, made of shingle,
and poking it up through the rafters inside
to be caught by a hanger who
poked it up higher in the rafters to another
who held a higher position
and so they filled the barn.
And the leaves hung down
like butterfly wings, though
sometimes the color of
luna moths, or Carolina parakeets, when just
an hour ago they had been
laid upon the old wooden
cart trailers pulled behind
the orange Allis-Chalmers tractor
with huge, round fenders and only
a screwdriver and salt in the tool box,
picked by primers so hot
we would race through the rows
to reach the twenty-five gallon
jugs of water placed throughout
the field to encourage and in attempt to
satisfy our insatiable thirsts
from drinking air which poured
through our pores without breaking
through to our need for more
water in the sun.
Sun we imagined to disappear
yet respected for growing all things on earth
when quenched with rains called forth
by our song and drumming.
Leaves, which weeks later, would be
taken down and the strings pulled
like string on top of a large dog food bag
and sheeted up into burlap sheets
that bundled over a hundred pounds
when we smashed down with our feet,
but gently smashing,
then thrown up high to
a catcher on a big clapboard trailer
pulled behind two ton trucks and
taken to market in Fuquay-Varina
and sold to Philip Morris and
Winston-Salem for around a buck a pound.
Leaves cured to a bright leaf,
a golden yellow with the strongest
aroma of tobacco barn curing
and hand grown quality
before the encroachment of
big business in the Reagan era
and the slow murder of method
from a hundred years before.
When the loons cried out in
laughter by the springs and
the bass popped the surface on
the pond, early on, next to
the fields, before that time
when it was unfashionable to
transplant each individual baby plant,
the infant tobacco we nurtured, to
transplant those seedlings to each hill
in the field, the space for that particular plant
and we watched as they would grow.
Before all of this new age, new way,
I was a sharecropper in Willow Springs, North Carolina
as were you and we were proud to be Tsa la gi
wishing for winter so we could make camp
at Qualla Boundary and Oconaluftee
would be free of tourists and filled with snow
and those of us who held out forever
and had no CIBs would be home again
with our people, while the BIA forgot to watch.
When we still remembered before even the Europeans,
working now shoulder to shoulder with descendants
of their slaves they brought from Africa
when they sold our ancestors as slaves into the Middle East,
that then the tobacco was sacred to all of us and we
prayed whenever we smoked and
did not smoke for pleasure and
I was content and free.
Then they came and changed things
and you left me for a fancy white girl
and I waited on the land
until you brought her back
in that brand new white Trans Am,
purchased from our crop, you gave her
and left her waiting in a motel,
the nearest one was forty miles away,
but near enough for you
and for her and I knew though
I never spoke a word to you
about it, I knew and I kept it to
myself to this day and time and
I never let on
until I left on our anniversary.
I drove the pick-up
down the dirt path by the empty fields
and rented a shack for eighty dollars,
the one with cardboard windows
and a Gillespie house floor design,
with torn and faded floral paper on walls
and linoleum so thin over rotted board
that the floor gave if you weighed over
a hundred pounds, I did not.
And with no running water of any kind, or bathroom.
The one at hilltop, where I could
see out across all the fields
and hunt for meat when I wanted
and find peace.
I heard you remarried
and went into automated farming
and kept up with America.
I watched all of you from the hill
and I waited for the lavender blooms
to return and when it was spring
even the blooms had turned white.
I rolled up my bedroll, remembering before,
when the fields were like waves on a green ocean,
and turned away, away from the change
and corruption of big business on small farms
of traditional agricultural people, and sharecroppers.
Away, so that I could always hold this concise image
of before that time and it
floods my memory.
Reprinted with permission from Dog Road Woman by Allison Adelle
Hedge Coke. Copyright © 1997 by Allison Adelle Hedge Coke.
Published by Coffee House Press. 1st US Reprint, Reinventing the
Enemy’s Language, Norton. Original Magazine Publication in Caliban.
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English
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The Year of the Rat
bu-bon-ic plague: a contagious disease characterized
by buboes, fever, and delirium
for days sirens hurl winding shrieks
bubble lights flashing red yellow red
yellow white linen
sheets no, drapery
rises and settles on
the feet no, the
hands are pulling it
back again “can you
hear us” they say and
scurry on down the shaolin passageways
the tunnels, or catacombs she lies in
stretch 105 mercury degree rising measure
quicksilver following break
cascading and soaring
could have reached 108
no one knows
faces, fingers, reappear
pumping machinery
struggling writhing throughout stomach, throat,
eyebrows knitted, pursing lips
blood-drained pallor cheeks they
push and force
tug and pull away plastics
snapping eyes, heels part
fading far farther
white the tunnels open wide
haunting dark red caverns tiny
obsidian chip eyes peeking through
the watchers those without fear of man
I can only spectate as
she slips into recall
dancers on toe chaotic climax
extremities held in tight circles
bent elbow, dainty toes, black-gray claws
ears slicked back like
a scorned, angered mare
whiskers gleam, tails streaming along to
the dance the dance
the Mardi Gras
the Coup d’état
the Marathon
They Shoot Horses Don’t They?
their bodies wrapped in fur as if they
should be dressed, primped, combed
frenzy filled they touch lightly almost
a ballet, or tap, no, free
dance they are free
from restraints
from being minor mammal
suddenly they huddle
gangly approach to center
like a sneak-up dance
exchanging excitement
they plan, this is no instinct,
they prepare, premeditate
mutinous recapture of the den
those tunnels outside, they
were not built by hares the
urine odor was not left by infants
dancers left this trace
to forewarn intruders
a single mother, newborn, and infant,
move in escaping her pistol-wielding spouse
lucky to be alive she tells herself
paying the burly biker landlord
every dollar she saved
for their escape, battered, bruised,
splintered dreams, she cradles both
babies climbing into the green
hand-painted slat board crib
nurses one gives a cracker
to the other
marching onto the so-called shelter
they appear through every
hole in ceiling, wall, and floor
a double dozen, or more,
they make their way into
the rooms leaping with ease
their foot and foot and a half
from nose to tip of tail lengths
lumbering onto shelves,
formica counters, the one antique
dresser riddled with wormholes,
teeth gnaw continuously turning
solid matter to Swiss cheese in the
den, the sheetmetal mobile home
the mother covers the sleeping
innocents she clutches an empty 2-liter glass
Coke bottle in the right hand
and iron claw hammer with rough, splintered
wooden handle in the left she
tells the pack, the herd, the congregation
these are her children
she says this with her eyes
she wedges herself into the corner of the crib
staying guard through
weary length of night, she
swings on occasion when
one ventures close—range
hoping to take a finger as
the lost child from Birdtown lost toes
to these years ago gnawing, growing
teeth in hopes of taking
the taste of milk
from sleeping baby lips
she connects at least twice each night
she never sleeps
the nightmares allow the rulers victory
dragging bones, her children’s, from their teeth
like game trophies to be hung below floors
she dozes midday in the
car with no gas and no floorboard
her babies tied to her
she never sets them down
“They are like tigers” her
dad told her “never corner them,
they become as panthers
as Bengals” he told her long ago
she wishes he had a
phone or that she had one
to get a message to him
that he was right that they
are here to prey on the
living, larger mammals man
she remembers her mother’s screams
at walls and stove ventilation
raving conversation with tormentors
no one else could see
and leaving at thirteen
her brother pounding her face
with fists and pool balls
his favorite hobby
her father hard at work every day
as if he could work away the madness
her sister fleeing six weeks before
packing one suitcase as if it were an overnight
remembering the way she said
“when they dance, they have it”
she knows this true firsthand,
she observes performance
the ritual
it terrifies her
the dance, the dance, bounding, leaping closer
here. she defends the trench of trailer,
the foxhole crib they lie in
while the rulers plan strategies
and taunt her
amazed at their aggressiveness
she wishes for a gun,
or knife, a better implement
to fight with during this
night they are especially
close the light, that one
single line, precise between earth
and sky both pitch
that clear blue white line appears
to break day, crows caw
outside the owls make roosting sounds
the watchers chew and twitch before
jumping to floor, scattering
to holes and scampering out of light
into the ground tunnels
into the underground
the den beneath this floor
like vampires retiring to mausoleums
to choreograph the “ring around the rosy”
for the new dusk to come
den of daytime
they sink into tunnels
like bats in daylight
with the same ammonia-filled stench
the young mother
closes her eyelids momentarily
only to seal them slightly
the pull so taut
black rings below she
slides over the crib railing
releasing bottle and club no,
hammer she thought it
a club wish splitting manifestation
she changes babies and feeds
them all she can
then bundles them
and ties them to herself
her sister once called her a pack-mule
babies cling like koala bear clip-ons
they know nothing of the danger
she raises them from
she wraps a big
towel around the three of them
covering her shoulders
with a faded car coat
they leave the
den leave the lights on
repelling rodents
in their absence
they walk
the small mother
carrying the full
load of three
kicking stones
along the way
remembering days before
days of war on homefronts
racing from attacks
knowing that for her
there is nowhere safe to run
a single brown sedan
flies by them on the long
stretch of highway
they amble alongside of
between steps they sigh
the gravel thickens
as they reach the country store
the wooden ramp under her feet
they enter
making way to shelving, hunting
hardware, holding careful watch
they locate traps
twelve inches long
she lifts four and then
four again,
lays eight on counter
she pleads for credit writing
promise on colored paper
the owner looks at her
at the traps
looks at her again
double-take
spine erect
she loads courage
in her eyes agreement
reached, she raises the bag
he dropped them into
retrieving items to count
eight she works up a pressed
curve of lip into slight smile
they
return, armed
the babies know nothing she thinks
and tells herself
she’s doing all she
can to take care of them and at
least their father can’t kill her now
she is bigger than these dancers
these new adversaries these
barons of the earth almost
as ancient as the roach though
twice as evil
she imagines them
tremendous dragons
and plans masquerading carnival
invitational trap once
again inside the den
mobile home
the trailer is decorated in Early American cardboard
she never unpacked on seeing the rats
the tiny woman gathers boxes, these boxes
she sets in appropriate positions,
vantage points, they secure
at night she places scoops
of commod peanut butter and oil
on the trap’s triggers and pulls
back the springs tucking in
tongue catch, setting force, she lays
them ever so gently deep inside
corrugated cubes
ripping newspaper
hoarded in her car trunk
to shreds
she gently, ever so
gently lets the shreds and strips
fall like crumbs of snow from her fingers
filling entirely the space above
the bottom, center-squared sharply pulling
back her hand to let them
“lie in peace”
masquerading as nesting
materials for those who come
at night for their underworld
home below her feet
and the crib’s
legs
the sky outside casts
over deepest gray, telltale coal
clouds surround the meadows out
in the open
lightning time
begins
the strikes stab sky
bolting toward the metal walls
and roof she quickly places the
babies into high chairs the chairs’ legs
safely set into eight decaying
sneakers four under each chair
the pots and pans
on the steel stove top
dance from surges
untamed electricity
lights the burners
all four knobs read OFF
over orange-red coils bouncing cookware
the dead motor
in the air conditioner
buzzes, jars and tries to turn over
though when she turned it ON
herself this strain never occurred
light bulbs hanging exposed from the ceiling
glow brighter with each lightning stroke
charges ignite and leap at times from sockets
the rubber soles of old
shoes protecting babies barely
she has done this before
stranded during storms in previous escapes
her husband always found her
as if his sonar hits
were more direct than lightning
the baby caught in everything
then there was one, now there are two
the three a family
by blood and flesh
clap and crash thunder pounds
sheet walls shimmy
vibrating from pressure and forces living, ruling
eventually the rains join the streaks
and dance in electrical fallout
the drops and sparks fire and
water
she sweeps the floor
watching the window the black dung
pellets left overnight flying out the
doorway day passes like all the
rest this year the dancers will
spin years of dreams night terrors
dark cyclones filled with black eyes
scraping, gnawing, teeth but
that is far into the future
she is here in the now
shadows skip sundial night
falls as a shade
night shade
night watch
the dancers clamber
out of chambers onto the
porch out of the sliding glass
doors she carries the babies
to the bright green crib and
lulls them to sleep
Indian songs she sings
she cradles them
in her arms until the slumber
is sufficient to last the night
time she takes the bottle that
glass 2-liter in her right
and the iron claw hammer
in her left and makes ready
she catches the dancers bounding
so elegantly, so gracefully
she catches sight
and smell of the
dancers
they watch her as
well creeping closer together
they huddle tails entwined
they scheme, slink away,
file into formations
taking the walls
floors and ceiling by storm
combative stances
they laugh her off
through the night she connects
a few again though they relish
their glory as kings she
nothing but a damsel
the largest dancer
a gift from Europeans
a giant from Norway—the
King he is a tyrant and always
taunting her this time they
get bored in this game and leap
showing off their egos inflated
they bound into boxes to
play with shredded stuffing and
quench the desire for
government-issue
peanut butter
trigger snaps
tongue catch and springs f l y
sending steel over
backs and bones and
fur four times then
rear lines follow four
more snaps the others
have no heart for fallen fellows
and continue the taunting closeness
edging toward her babies
dodging glass and hammer claw
the game so merrily played
throughout the hours in this
night in the long
month of September this
time she feels some sort of
security
when crack-light
dawn breaks the still sky
the survivors retreat she
lifts the first box the
rodent’s dead weight
makes her sick
even though she
cannot see it through the
shredded papers still filling
space covering the body
weight and smell fill her
with fear that it will jump
toward her sight unseen
and lay its fangs into her
skin she casts the box
at least twenty feet out
the door
she slowly walks
over to inspect its contents
the cadaver lies back broken
twelve or more inches long
she wants to throw up but
has no time all the others
sail out into the meadow
because each time she feels
their dead weight her arms
uncontrollably fling boxes
one by one until
eight are spread
hours later she recovers
the shock initial
and begins releasing traps to reset
peanut butter surprise
she washes her hands and
arms for forty minutes
straight before caring for
the children, for the day
the children know nothing, they’re so
innocent, they don’t know anything
it is so still, the wind drifting stench
is the only movement the sky
remains dark, blackest black
gray-tipped lining cloud
boxes, traps, shreds
boxes, traps, shreds
boxes traps, shreds
she commits to the order
front line in corrugated mine field
snap, spring, dancers fall
the flank moves forward
the landlord comes one day
when he arrives she cries to
him begging for abatement
rent on the den he laughs
her off his ears look like
the king’s—pointed she steals
serial number from his
work truck to garnish his
wages in court she will sue
she says he backhands
her just as her husband did
so many times before she
left him in June paid the
rent three month’s advance
to this wannabee slumlord
single dwelling dictator
this leech of land-
lord-ing now the winter is
approaching fast the babies notice
and cry they notice
they are aware
time is running out
the owner of the store
is surprised to see her
he agrees to take her to town to file
small claims court in a few weeks
the landlord tells the judge
that the reason the rats came
was because of her housekeeping
“No. They were already here.”
she says showing pictures of rats in
traps she drew to scale
the babies crawl around the
courtroom the people stare
and shake their heads they judge,
they convict, they send her to
jail in their minds “You Honor,
it’s the truth” she says and he
allows her to reclaim one hundred dollars
suggesting she “look better
next time you rent” her shoulders
rise and tighten, lips part
salted words dissolve on her tongue
the babies scamper around
till they locate her legs
and climb
up to be held tight.
a singer she knows tells her about
a basement apartment,
fixer-up rental they collapse
into it smells sweet they eat and
sleep night passing something
scratches and runs in the
false ceiling she sees black
eyes in her mind she hits
the white, dusty panels
and a possum falls
almost into her arms
she screams, then laughs hysterically
they get a cat, a real mouser
the feline patrols every night
protecting the babies
they sleep on a mattress
no longer in a crib
there are no shadows
from slats on their faces babies
turn into tots and play
she writes songs
gathering random chords
prays to be left alone
and prays not to be lonesome
she falls to sleep writing and smiling
at her children
she dreams
she is in the tunnels of the
rulers former terrorists who
was the tenant? this question
in dreamscape
her body becomes ridden with pain
sickness so strong
fever shoots so high
nothing can bring it down
five days have passed
amnesia, the sickness reels, she tries to cry
but her lips won’t work
she lies in her own vomit
her hand reaches out with effort
to the silhouette of the younger child
she contacts dry parched skin like old
paper paper-thin leather, fragile gray
her skin is also gray she
can see it the older child
across her feet both children out
cold dying or already gone
she cannot move
darkness, quiet silence, death is coming
she smells it and turns away
to turn, to f a l l
to fall to the floor she crawls
like the babies to the wall she
cannot reach the phone
she pushes open the door and falls
out into the cold
the fierce cold of this winter
her fever melts the snow next to
her gray, gray skin schoolchildren
stumble across her body and run
for help down the dirt road
they scurry
their mother lifts her into their
wagon station wagon they lay
her babies beside her in the back
Is this a hearse?
the clinic doctor will not
allow them within doors “No way
they are gray, look at them.”
He covers his mouth and face with enormous hands
the strangers drive a hour to a
Public Health Service Hospital
and leave the three behind as they
hurry home for supper
the tiniest on saline intravenous
once he can speak
the biggest child tells the story
of the last five days
he fed the baby while his mother
lay dying “I thought she would
died” he says explaining that after the third day
he couldn’t feed the baby and crawled in with
her he saw the baby crawl in the fourth day
“I think it was yesterday, dunno”
in another room she is told “They will make it,
you didn’t lose your children.”
“Can you hear us? ”
the tunnels close
in around her the glass beads
black, those eyes like size
ten seed beads glassy, shiny
they watch her, they rule
I
have witnessed all of this from
far above this
plague-ridden room floating
around I feel free enough to
dance
I
look back at she
once I suppose was me
too difficult I decide
and watch a little longer I slip in above
the babies
I know they need her to come back
delirious she yells “What’s the cover routine? ”
those hands slip a needle
to vein she jerks I jerk
with her and reclaim the body
while the mind encounters steely eyes
dancers
plague dreams, reality
leaping, flying, scampering
gnawing innocents
good healthy bodies
tearing away the escape of a lifetime
those tunnels full to brim
rodents racing through time
through this year the fever
falls
chills rise my skin
bead goose bumps, my mind
is clearing “Are the dancers gone?
Are the babies okeh?” Hands and
faces embody nurses, doctors
“Have you had any recent contact
with any small animals? ” they ask
recall dancers on toe chaotic climax frenzy
they dance the dance they dance
(Copyright © 1992 Allison Hedge Coke 1997 Coffee House Press in
Dog Road Woman. First Reprint in "Visit TeePee Town." Original
Magazine Publication in 13th Muse.)
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