I’ll bet you think this stupid little song
can’t grapple with your sterling stainless crimes:
your girls, your gods, your guns, your drugs, your throngs
of money-grubbing fat cats with their chimes
and chings that ring out profits, assets, bombs.
Your liquor stores, your liquid love so fine
it souses babies’ brains. You do them wrong,
these wounded humans ruined by your cheapjack wine.
And yet, you are a friendly enemy—
you live with us, you eat with us, you sleep
with us. A stealthy kind of enmity
you practice, as you dispense your wares and keep
this killing that you make while tot’s impaired.
This reservoir of pain? There’s no repair.

Healing Circle

Sober, you hold the talking feather
as you speak. The Elder calls it
kihêw mîkwan and with a tremor
you rise with the eagle as you
embrace us with your wings of heartbreak.
Your story in this circle hurts
you to relive it as you tell it.
Your story in this circle hurts
me to see you relive it.
But you soar with the eagle
as you give us your story
you give us your pain
you give us your tears.

Your mom sits beside you, her arm
on your young but manly shoulder as your knees shake
and your tears come with the words. You have
a daughter you say before passing
the talking feather to your mom.
When she holds the kihêw mîkwan
and speaks, your hand on her shoulder
comforts her as she tells us what happened to her
while carrying you for nine months.
Your tears over your daughter,
your mom’s hand on your shoulder,
and now your hand on her shoulder show me
finally, finally
about inter-generational trauma.

When my sweaty palm clutches
the kihêw mîkwan much later
after all the others, it shouldn’t
hurt me to tell you I didn’t
know about the wreckage of alcohol
until I was nearly an adult.
It shouldn’t hurt me to tell you
my two parents didn’t need
liquor in their home. It shouldn’t
hurt me to tell you I remember
four grandparents who loved me.

It shouldn’t hurt me to open
my wings to tell you.
But it does.

And in the tears and the telling
and the hearing, this circle wounds.
But in the tears and the telling
and the hearing, this circle heals.

You’ll Never Turn from Her Humanity

All I can see is the insanity.
Despite the bile and boil and frequent squalls,
you’ve never turned from her humanity.

Her ship, it pitches with profanity;
she’s prey to colonizer’s liquored gall.
His screech the source of the insanity.

Along with chaos came calamity:
malevolent excess of ethanol
that floods the hull of her humanity.

Perhaps her shame became the vanity
that lists with intoxicants to appall.
All I can see is the insanity.

Distiller’s swill still charts her destiny;
her predators, we hear them caterwaul.
You never turn from her humanity.

No anchor and no cure, adrift at sea:
prenatal exposure to alcohol.
Though all I see is the insanity,
you’ll never turn from her humanity.