Ode in Celebration of Harriet’s Open Door
46 years after the Treaty of Ghent, 39 years after the 1st Treaty of Chicago, 30 years after the Indian Removal Act, and 27 years after the 2nd Treaty of Chicago, Harriet Monroe was born
dear Harriet, those are some facts that place me in your narrative. By the time you were born, Act II of the Policies to cut and scrape away the scarf skin of Indigenous America was in full view atop a plateau of Suck[the life]sessions.
The Established deployment of Annihilation as Spectacle fine dining and theater extravaganza nourishes the settler diet. And I wonder how many of these dining experiences you engaged in, unknowingly perhaps, how the world set expectations for you, a female consumer. What was chewed and swallowed in choral adoration? How you merged or were devoured with the American taste for bloodiness?
By the time you were born in 1860, the outdated American Indian diorama [accessed by invitation only] housed in the United States’ Archives of Genocidal Trinkets [located several miles from its trophy cases of gold-plated accolades in the Capitol] emanated a lingered aroma. The catalogued Indigenous languages – rubbed out – flattened into whiteness, bled into marginalia
the diorama’s parlanced foundation ledgered the relocated Indians [Potawatomi, Ojibwe, Odawa, and Menominee] into columns, categorized by [ill-fulfilled] treaty obligations – reconciling the voided humanity into federal census reports – with few living subjects available, they become “Objects of science Indians'' (tribal tongue and throat carved breath foreign and inarticulate, the modern tongue intimidated by the sharp, abrupt acrobatics of Indigenous wind). The remains shapeshift into a romanticized deck of assimilated Indian collector cards, a limited edition rimmed in the trendy “Savage Slaughter Red,” a highly sought-after pigment for every Patriot’s parlor room walls
O how the glints of tarnished valor falsely wave
dear Harriet, where do I find you within the unverified, folded, paginated, labeled partitions? Where do your remnants lie in the poetic verse left for me – what lyrical master key unlocks the moist space on your lap, the rhythmic curve of your penmanship, calling the wind of your breath to order?
I listen in the oceanic groans, a lofty gray whale dipping in – and in, and out – the musty musk lure propels the searching, big-breath deep – deeper for crystalline equal opportunity. I’ve attempted to assemble motor car chugging – I am gulped, the squalled syllables drowned as English sound speak reshapes – inflates, extends, sharply snips, rollercoaster contortioning+proportioning, a propitiation back toward Indigenous cadence, sounds – washed ashore, I lay gulping, gasping, searching for an ancient sound to decipher you
in breath – reconfiguring the woman from ashes – dear Harriet, I am searching for your well-weathered palms, the altar
embers marking flesh
charring the hemmed interiors of your nightgown
narrating the creased lines, the geological canyons, discarded & denounced
voices replicated in chugging Chicagoan motors, gears grinding out
Verse, Voice, Venerability
Was your coronet cognitively sestinated?
your hair spun ‘round a copper crown of songs
rising from your belly, a skyward vocal expanse
from a gorge, your teleutons
handy in dress pockets – and with no avail – your rhyme & meter
decorously enjambed societal divisions
with ardent smile, a bonfire to never behold
as you prefer a closed mouth portraiture, embers pantoumed
a painterly brush pigmenting (blank) meter in your persistent footstep
dear Harriet, meet me here in the untranslatable
sparsely decorated waiting room of
mutated tongues – the Angel Island of scrambled syntax
de-(fa)militarized
a gun belting discomfort securely fastened to the hip
from this day on, I have loosened the tightly cinched holster – loosened the tightly cinched chronicles – I search to palimpsest your shadow
sewing itself into the Victorian laced-dowry, a raveling hem
patterning the path to neatly hand-stitched fragments of Verse & intersections, states of opacity into light, the lightness – or captive released
Harriet, You need to work for my closeness – the familiarity of My tongue – my breath – my pause my hesitation opaquely speaks
dear Harriet, you soldier of the 20th century, assist me in outlining fault lines so I may walk stridently afoot the sandy path
the landscape is begging me to find new language for it = speaking/writing broken languages what did your landscape beg of you?
the Magazine of Verse, the Confessional where sanctity and sacred equates to tantrummeling interiors – how the good efforts to keep the Door open be honored, may the collective efforts of the legacy holders remain true
87 years after your passing, I memorialize your labor, the tools of use/access to prep a Poetics topsoil - I memorialize the land I love - whose name, and songs refuse erasure
Your legacy bolstered against half-closed doors
where the clothes of captivity become manure
dear Harriet, may you rest knowing your magazine continues to move toward being a gathering place “where the nations of the earth shall meet in joy together."
