Karenne Wood

There are too many of us for you to believe you are either alone or responsible. No woman asks for this. Some are children. Some are boys. Every one of us should have been heard. This is for Anna, age 17, who was then beaten and left to die; for Nathan, who at 11 admired the basketball coach; for Rosaline, who sees in her baby the face of a rapist and who finds that face difficult to love; for sisters when soldiers came, mothers imprisoned among guards, for aunties grandmas daughters sons, for one who was tied and one who tried to scream, one whose husband watched, one violated time after time, one torn apart, who called the police who did not call her back, who went to the clinic where there were no kits, who numbed her shame with drugs, who could not drink enough to forget, who took her life, who believed she was an object, who said nothing, who knew no one was there and that no one would ever be there. Know this: there are so many that if we could speak, our voices might spread like floodwaters over their boots and swell past security stations; that if we cried out together we might finally understand it as an assault on all people, all creation, and maybe then there would be justice in this war to claim yourself, a struggle mapped all over the flesh of every woman or child who has known what it is to be used, as you were, your sacred body.

Some nights we feel the furred darkness of an ancient one's breath and are trapped in awakening, dismembered by events we no longer recall. We can touch the windowsill, where October air gathers as hours slip past in thin robes, the forest a concert of voices. The last crickets let go of their songs. The land speaks, its language arising from its own geography— the mountains' hulked shapes are blue whales, remembering when they were undersea ridges, and rivers are serpentine strands hammered from silver, and dark trees talk to the wind—weaving mortal lives, drumbeats, pillars of smoke, voices wavering into updraft, the storyteller shifting the present.

I. The first question is always phrased this way: “So. How much Indian are you?” II. We did not live in tepees. We did not braid our hair. We did not fringe our shirts. We did not wear war bonnets. We did not chase the buffalo. We did not carry shields. We were never Plains Indians. We tried to ride, but we kept falling off of our dogs. III. A local official came to our office to ask our help with a city event. He had a splendid idea, he said. To kick off the event and show everyone in town that our tribe was still around, we should go up to the bluff overlooking the city and make a big smoke signal. Then they would know we were here. Who ever heard of smoke signals in the forests? I imagined us upon the bluff, lighting one of those firestarter bricks. We haven’t made fire since the Boy Scouts took over. And how would the citizens know it was us? They’d probably call the fire department. IV. As they ask, they think,yes, I can see it in her face. High cheekbones (whatever those are)and dark hair. Here’s a thought: don’t we all have high cheekbones? If we didn’t, our faces would cave in. (But I do have a colonized nose.) I’m sick of explaining myself. “You know,” I finally say, “It doesn’t matter to my people.” I ride off to my ranch-style home. Time to weave a basket, or something.

When I learned I might have cancer, I bought fifteen white lilies. Easter was gone: the trumpets were wilted, plants crooked with roots bound in pots. I dug them into the garden, knowing they would not bloom for another year. All summer, the stalks stood like ramshackle posts while I waited for results. By autumn, the stalks had flopped down. More biopsies, laser incisions, the cancer in my tongue a sprawling mass. Outside, the earth remained bare, rhizomes shrunken below the frost line. Spring shoots appeared in bright green skins, and lilies bloomed in July, their waxed trumpets pure white, dusting gold pollen to the ground. This year, tripled in number, they are popping up again. I wait, a ceremony, for the lilies to open, for the serpentine length of the garden to bloom in the shape of my tongue’s scar, a white path with one end leading into brilliant air, the other down the throat’s canyon, black and unforgiving. I try to imagine what could grow in such darkness. I am waiting for the lilies to open.

after Miller Williams This is to say we continued. As though continuing changed us. As though continuing brought happiness as we had known. On a dry field without cover, his skin blistered raw in the sun. Not one among us came, as though he had no relations. What did we say to our brother? How could we leave him alone while soldiers guarded his corpse as though precious to them? One of the women, in darkness, crept to the field where he died, prayed for him, covered him up. Dust over what was not dust. We would have ventured out with her if we had loved ourselves less. We had to think of our children, and he was not coming back. How could we live with the silence, live with our grief and our shame? Death did not heal what he suffered. He was making demands. We did not want him to be there, asking the question he asked us, changing the sound of his name. He had embarrassed us. This is the memory we carried, avoiding the thought that he remained face down among the charred grasses, holding the earth with his hands.

I. The time has come for the nation to turn a new page by righting wrongs of the past. We apologise for laws and policies that inflicted profound grief, suffering, and loss and for the removal of children from families, communities, and country. For the pain of these, their descendants, and for families left behind, to mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, for indignity inflicted on a proud people, we say sorry. We resolve that the injustices of the past must never, never happen again and look to a future based on mutual respect, where all, whatever their origins, are equal partners. Spoken by Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, introduced in January and delivered November 29, 2008, the day after he was sworn into office

All this time I've been looking for words for certain difficult women because they aren't able to speak for themselves, and now the Clinton Foundation has come up with a brilliant campaign—they decided, for International Women's Day, through digital magic to erase women on the cover of Condé Nast, posters, billboards, those figures replaced by empty space because women have not yet achieved gender equity, as noted on a website, not-there.org, and they're right. We haven't. But when I read about not-there.org and saw its flashy graphics, I wasn't thinking about how women are not-there-yet, metaphorically, I just thought about women who are really not there, women and girls who keep disappearing (not from magazines, who don't make news in Manhattan) like they've evaporated, like illusions, hundreds in Juárez, twelve hundred missing and murdered Native women across Canada. The hands of men. Now you see her. Not. Not-there. Not here, either, or anywhere. Maybe only part of the problem is the predatory perpetrator- prestidigitator who more often than not knows her, knows how to keep her quiet, who may claim to love her, even, maybe getting even—or the serial rapist-killer in the bushes who bushwhacks her in the dark. You're always safe, says the forensic psychiatrist, unless a monster happens to show up, and then you're not. Not-there. Maybe a lonely mandible, maxilla, fibula, or ulna shows up, or a bagged body gets dragged from the river. Or not. Is this the value we permit a woman's life to have (or not-have) throughout a wrong world, a global idea of her as disposable parts? In the end, this is not a xenophobic poem, not specific—it's everywhere. Not-there. Right here. Yes, the sun rises anyway, but now the parents are staring past each other, that zero between them like a chalked outline in their family photograph. Or not.