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Sarah Camille Chiago
For George,
it’s difficult now to speak of poetry
when scarlet hues dance on the skin
he chants over time as each minute drips
from his mouth and disappear's
i am trying to run from this type of poetry,
i mean all the run-ons and rhetoric
that seems to follow me through each moon and blood
but i will still listen even if it does not do me kind
in solidarity, the hydrangeas that sleep on the windowsill listen with me
even if we both are wilting from his speech, we are both waiting to return to soil one day
there was a time we both took bus rides through the gravel, and then i was still a girl
trying to hold onto all the noise, grasp every syllable, tend to the broken, and let it drape
over the tissue. i will listen to a man, i will listen to a man i once thought
but now i understand it to only bore wounds, and i promise that this much is true
if i should fall before the sun swims through carpools
i hope a part of me remembers how much i missed the quiet
Salt Women’s Ashes
After Ada Limón,
we hold each other in open water as it pours down our throats. like fog into dusk. my dearest, do you know much i wish to save the women in me? my time is fleeting, and yours ages sweetly. if i stay with you long enough, will you hold light the same way i banish it from my body? it is a privilege to shine, and if i chose to light myself on fire, all anyone would see are the ashes. when i was nineteen, an aunt asked if i’ll ever have children. i wondered if i was running out of days. i still do. because all the witches in our stories had wombs, i think there is a curse inside me i will never break, just learn to tangle into. once, my grandmother told me my grandfather’s love was not shiny bright, but a slow burning ember and all i could think of was if she ever felt the warmth.
Sarah Camille Chiago
is an enrolled member of the Salt River
Pima-Maricopa Indian Community. Although, she considers half of her
heart to be rooted within the Gila River Indian Community, where her
mother’s family is from and where most of her inspiration for poetry
lies along the desert floor. Raised by a single mother traveling back
and forth between Arizona and California, she uses writing to connect
back to herself and all that has become lost along the way. She is
currently a Junior at the Institute of American Indian Arts, where she
studies Creative Writing with an emphasis on Poetry.