The road unwound like
a long-held breath,
its rhythm soft as
the heartbeat of stone.
She leaves the earth of
Mesas behind, red dust
curling in the rearview,
the bones of
old places.
The sky is wide enough
for her grief tonight,
stretching taut,
bruised with stars,
a canvas for memories
she cannot bury.
She drives east, a hymn
to the unbroken road.
Her body a map,
etched in ink, scar,
and story, a nurse’s hands,
a wanderer’s soul.
But grief does not shake;
it settles, heavy
as a stone,
silent as the wind.
The sky stretches endless,
its wounds glowing
faint in the
morning light.
She breathes it in,
the ache, the wonder,
the endless gathering
of what is lost
and what remains.
She wonders if she
could reach up,
pluck her sorrow
from the heavens
and hold it like
a wildflower,
its petals torn
but still fragrant,
resting on graves.
Some mornings, I wake unsure which world I’ve landed in. My body is here, jittered, somewhat grounded, pressed to the cold skin of earth, the taste of coffee lingering at the back of my mouth. But my mind is scattered across dream and daylight: one part drifting through old stories, the other scrolling the infinite blue of my phone, looking for a sign that I still belong to something older than algorithms.
Dreams have always been more than private flickers behind closed eyes. Among my people, dreams are the braids that bind us—to land, to each other, to those who came before and those not yet born. Dreaming isn’t solitary; it’s a communal current, threading through ceremonies, firesides, and quiet dawns. The dreamers are weavers.They return with gifts: stories, warnings, laughter, medicine for the waking world.
Joy Harjo calls these dreamers “poet warriors.” I read her words in Poet Warrior and feel the braid tighten around me, a gentle, insistent pull. She writes, “We are evidence of love, the burdens and gifts we carry,” and I sense the weight and the lift of that inheritance. She reminds me that story itself is a braid, never a single strand, but three, four, a dozen voices woven together. The dreamer listens not just to their own heart, but to the wind rattling the cottonwoods, to the ancestors whispering through the river, to the coyote slipping through the dawn.
I often reflect on what it means to be part of a story that is bigger than just myself. Poet Warrior isn’t a book that moves in a straight line. Instead, it circles and returns, built from fragments and spirals. Harjo’s chapters loop back on themselves, weaving together poems, memories, songs, prayers, and prose. Each layer adds meaning, like a river building up silt or a petroglyph deepening with time. Reading her work gives me permission to let my own writing roam, to braid together poetry and memory, image and reflection, to trust that the story will hold together, even when I can’t see its full shape.
#
I can’t do anything
but talk to the wind,
to the moon
but cry out goddamn goddamn
to stones
and to other deathless voices
that I hope will carry
us all through.” ― Joy Harjo
The first time I pressed my hand to a petroglyph on the basalt cliffs above the Columbia, I didn’t know what I was supposed to feel. The stone was warm, almost oscillating. The spiral carved there was older than any story I’d heard in English, older than the language I never learned but sometimes dream in. It felt like a conversation I’d arrived late to, but could still lean in close and catch a word or two. Stepping into a circle already formed, voices looping through the centuries, I pressed my ear to the stone, caught a word, snagged a thread, and let myself be woven in. Even if I had missed the beginning, somehow, I belonged.
“Remember, you are this universe and this universe is you.”
I think about craft, what it means to make a mark meant for someone you may never meet. The old petroglyphs were not just art, but message: I was here. We hunted here. Water came from this place. The salmon ran strong. Maybe a prayer layered in, or a bit of trickster mischief. The tools were simple. The intention was not. Harjo teaches that poetry, much like petroglyphs,is a way of listening as much as speaking. She writes, “I follow the spiral to the core, to the source, to where dreaming and the story begin.” My own tools now are a cracked phone, a battered notebook, a keyboard sticky with coffee rings. My marks are digital, ephemeral, a tweet, a story pinned to a map, a GPS breadcrumb trail a cousin left to show where the old berry patches still grow. But the intention remains: to reach someone beyond my sight, to leave a trace that says,
This is what mattered to me. This is what I saw.
#
I sit up in the dark drenched in longing. / I am carrying over a thousand names for blue that I didn’t have at dusk.”― Joy Harjo
When I read Poet Warrior, I recognize the mark-making urge in myself. The need to leave something, not just for remembrance, but for renewal. Harjo reminds me that every mark was new once, every story is a risk, every dreamer in danger of being erased or misunderstood. The work is not to guarantee permanence, but to show up with intention: to carve, in whatever medium, a story that’s honest, open, and willing to be found. “The story is always ahead of you, waiting to be found,” Harjo writes. Her words invite me to experiment with form: to let prose and poetry flow together, to create layers a future reader might sift through like sediment, discovering pieces of what was meant.
The best marks, I think, are collaborative, layered with meaning the maker never imagined. In Harjo’s words, “We all become ancestors in training.” What we leave behind is not only for remembrance, but for renewal.
Ravens fly mid thought across the white backdrops of Sangre de Cristo peaks, descending in hushed lines of wind brought together through patterns and will- stingy in the knowledge of flight. I watch sad and mad in my jealous indignation at such a feat. Perhaps it is the plight of the human to have to deal with heartbreak, bills and 9-5 because we forgot how to fly ourselves.
The air was heavy with the scent of possibilities, mist mingled in fire smoke and ravens wings.
Did you know that the black we see in the raven is not black at all but a spectrum of rainbow light so distinct and grand that only the chosen may glimpse.
I have always wanted to be chosen by the raven- to be seen, to fit in. to be a part of something only registered as a secret- to be a key holder to esoteric knowledge and the divinity of unseen light.
The mountains sang in up drafts and bitter wind, songs of a corvid knowing echoing beneath basalt and longing.
I looked up by chance, to see an Eagles dance- and a song of Fuck You to the Raven brood. I assume it is because they shine like the sun, and Eagles are jealous too.
And you know the sun’s settin’ fast
And just like they say, nothing good ever lasts – Iris Dement
Caught up with Ana at the San Cristobal post office, where the Sangre de Cristo Mountains keep watch and the air smells of sage when the wind shifts. She’s always got her hands busy; sorting mail, humming under her breath, listening more than she speaks.
She tells me things were different once. Her mother remembers when Dennis Hopper might be seen at the café in Taos, drifting in with the sunrise, pockets full of stories and rumors. Back then, folks say D.H. Lawrence wrote letters just up the road at his ranch, chasing words like they were wild horses. Ana says it felt like all kinds of people passed through—artists, poets, wanderers—leaving a trace of themselves in the dust and laughter that filled old adobe porches.
Now, Ana sorts through postcards from Santa Fe, the odd letter from grandkids in Albuquerque, bills addressed in shaky handwriting. The bulletin board out front is cluttered with lost dog flyers and sun festival announcements, a faded poem tacked up by someone who never signed their name. It’s quieter these days, she says.Stories get traded softly, almost like apologies.
She pulls out a letter addressed to “The Friend I Miss.” Says sometimes she finds a book tucked in a parcel, or a clipping about Aldous Huxley, who once wandered these mountains and left behind only rumors and a few lines about the light. There’s always a stack of undeliverables; a map with trails nobody walks anymore, postcards with no addresses, messages that seem to drift in from another time.
I ask if she misses the old San Cristobal. She shrugs, says the world turned inward; most folks wave from behind car windows and screens now, and even the newcomers with dreams of writing keep mostly to themselves. But sometimes, when the Sangre de Cristos catch fire at dusk and the cottonwoods whisper with the river, Ana swears she can still feel the old magic—just a heartbeat away, just this side of dreams.
“Some folks call her a runaway. A failure in the race. But she knows where her ticket takes her. She will find her place in the sun”
― Tracy Chapman
Wilma stands beneath the sour glow of the Dollar General, the jaundiced sign humming over sage and river stones. Inside, the aisles are bright with plastic—candy-bright, memory-light—replacing the smell of bread that once crept from shuttered doors just down the road.
She rings up locals—faces creased by wind, pockets heavy with worry—stories trading hands like loose coins: a missing dog, a sun-festival in a canyon, a brother lost to the blues. Wilma gathers them in, her touch gentle as rain on dust.
At closing, she slips outside into the blue hush, mountains looming—watchful, bruised. She lights her menthol, exhales halos and steps under the holy light of neon, flickering behind her as coyotes call just beyond the shadows. Wilma walks home, steps soft as moth wings, carrying the day’s small losses, still searching for wild iris, just this side of dreams.
Rosaleen unlocked the door at eleven, the screen creaking open as pale dust danced in the shaft of morning light. The diner was quiet, its checkerboard curtains catching the sun, red trim glowing against the hush that filled the space.
In the kitchen, Tia was already at work, hair tied back, moving with a calm efficiency through the rising scent of chile warming in the pan. She hummed something old, her tune for no one but herself, as steady as the rhythm of her hands.
Out front, Rosaleen wiped down the Formica counters, set the forks straight, and checked the register. The visitor log lay open, names drifting across the page in blue ink—Wyoming, Berlin, Austin, even a doodle of a mountain. Locals knew to come after noon, their boots heavy, their stories heavier. Tourists arrived earlier, the screen door snapping shut behind them as they glanced at the Marilyn Monroe prints, the pie safe, and the handwritten sign:
“Breakfast All Day / Open 11-5.”
Coffee was poured, pie was served. Rosaleen’s voice was gentle, with just a trace of her grandmother’s Spanish in it—her cariño, soft as a secret, slipping into the morning air.
In the far corner, the jukebox played a song just out of reach, something slow, a melody that tasted of Patsy Cline and sunlight warming old tile. Tia called out orders in a timid voice that brooked no argument, red chile glistening as she wrapped burritos tight in Christmas colors. Rosaleen’s laughter mingled with her aunt’s in the steam and clang of pans.
The hours slipped by, measured in coffee refills, the sighing hush of the screen door, and the ever-growing list of names in the visitor registry—a traveler from Maine lost on the backroads, someone from El Paso, someone else just passing through.
At five, Rosaleen turned the sign, rinsed the last mug, and listened as the jukebox winds down its last dance- “I go out walking, looking for you”- She stood by the screen door with sunset falling across the empty booths, thinking of all the names left behind—lost, just on the other side of dreams.
I gave an old hippy named Willy a ride- he told me about heartbreak and being a hermit- told me I was on my way and let me know there is nothing to worry about.
He writes songs and said he just came from a festival they named after the sun- it was nestled in a canyon near Red River, I assume the festival is for the appreciation of light.
He hits my vape and tells me about the time he flew, car decided to try out for being an angel- forgot to get permission waivers from Willy.
He laughs and shows me old scars, coughs, tells me the weed these days is too strong.
He gets out, trailer 23, just this side of dreams.
“Call your spirit back. It may be caught in corners and creases of shame, judgment, and human abuse.
You must call in a way that your spirit will want to return.” – Joy Harjo
Introduction
Sometimes I think of this blog as a basket. A basket I’m always filling with fragments of myself. Land and water have their own ways of holding onto what matters, even as everything else shifts and slips away. Longing and belonging run through these pages; old stories keep surfacing, no matter how often we’re told to let them go or leave them behind.
Home Guard on the Columbia, by Benjamin A Gifford (1899) (photo- courtesy The Valley Library, Oregon State University)
I keep circling back to those in-betweens: between faith and doubt, between what we’re allowed to say and what we still need to hear. Being two spirit, being queer, being Indigenous, none of it fits neatly into the categories handed down by those pamphlets and sermons. The stories I share here are often untidy, sometimes awkward, sometimes just a breath or a question.
Writing all this has been my way of making sense of what’s been lost and what still survives. Of finding the places where grief and hope sit side by side. Some days, the words come easy, like Coyote slipping through the brush; other days, it’s just sitting with the ache, waiting for something true to rise up.
Art by Si Matta
If you find yourself anywhere in this tangle—wondering, remembering, searching for language that feels like home—just know you’re not alone. There’s room here for all of it: the old stories, the quiet resistance, the new ways we find to belong to ourselves and each other. This is just another piece of the gathering. Let’s see where it leads.
I.Where the Story Glitched
As the onslaught of settlers to the Columbia River Basin dredged a new paradigm of disease and displacement, there was what Hunn describes as a “spiritual apocalypse” among the River People. (Hunn & Selam, 1990, p. 241) A “spiritual apocalypse” where animist cultures struggled with the biological reality of disease, for there had to be a spiritual reason for the trauma- something must be out of alignment with the spirit.
There are stories older than the fractures we inherit. Before the missionaries, before the epidemics, before the thunder of Coyote’s mischief echoed up the river, there was a different kind of order—one in which Tsagaglalal kept her eyes on the people, and the world was alive with spirit. But when Coyote turned her to stone and declared an end to women’s leadership, something was set in motion. Later, when settlers swept through, bringing disease and displacement, the River People faced not just a physical apocalypse, but a spiritual one. My ancestors, like so many others, searched for meaning in the devastation, believing something must be out of alignment with the spirit. I feel that search still, running like an undercurrent beneath my own questions of belonging, faith, and truth. The fracture didn’t end with them. It runs through me, too, and through the stories I’m still learning how to tell. In my family, and in the memories that float up around shared meals or linger in the quiet after a prayer, I sense the echoes of this original break. There’s a hunger to explain why so much was lost, why the world my great-grandparents described feels so different from the one I grew up in. The old stories say that when Coyote came upriver, laughing and clever, he brought change that was meant to keep order, but instead left us with a wound that never quite healed. Tsagaglalal—She Who Watches—was given a stone body so she could see forever, but her voice became something we had to listen for in the wind, or in the pause before an elder speaks.
When settlers arrived, carrying new gods and new diseases, the ground shifted again. The River People, rooted in animist ways,where stones, salmon, and even the wind carried spirit, were suddenly forced to face loss on a scale that felt impossible. Hunn called it a “spiritual apocalypse,” a time when the breach between body and spirit became impossible to ignore. When whole villages disappeared overnight, when familiar ceremonies failed to keep death away, my ancestors,like so many others at the time, searched for answers in the only places they could: in dreams, in stories, in the uneasy sense that something was out of balance in the world.
It’s strange how trauma moves through generations. The original fracture—the turning of a matriarch to stone, the erasure of women and two spirit people from ceremony, was just the first. Every wave of missionaries, every epidemic, every law forbidding ceremony or language widened that split, until the silence itself felt inherited. I grew up catching glimpses of what was missing: a grandmother’s hesitation before telling an old story, a tightening around the word “queer,” the careful folding of hands before a meal, as if trying to keep the sacred from spilling out.
I wonder sometimes if this is why shame comes so easily—why depression feels built into the
My Sister and I, circa 1979
bones, why addiction and silence become so familiar. Colonial violence didn’t just take land or language; it planted silence deep in our blood, teaching our ancestors to guard their words, to tuck away what was sacred or strange for fear of punishment or loss. When you’re told that spirit and body are separate, that who you are or who you love is out of alignment with what the world expects, the original wound gets handed down- wrapped in shame, caution and grief. That kind of silence settles in quietly, showing up in the hesitation before a question, in the way stories are stopped short, in the careful ways we move through spaces that never felt safe for all of who we are. It’s a fracture that isn’t just history. It’s lived and relived every day, quietly shaping how we see ourselves and what we’re allowed to speak aloud. In this haze, the birds whispered my name.
II. The Birds Whispered My Name
Some birds are not meant to be caged, that’s all.- Stephen King
The birds whispered my name,
As I fidgeted on a cold chair,
Learning of a god dressed in thorns.
As they talked in righteous dictation,
I would pull thorny brambles from dirty hands-
Finding god in the splinters.
I remember how the rain tasted-
Dry in safe beds made from synthetic fibers.
Yet I could hear the birds whisper my name,
Telling me stories,
We forgot to tell ourselves.
A very early drawing my sister, Jadie Russell, drew in church. 1980′s
In my family, and in the memories that float up around shared meals or linger in the quiet after a prayer, I sense the echoes of this original break. There’s a hunger to explain why so much was lost, why the world my great-grandparents described feels so different from the one I grew up in. The old stories say that when Coyote came upriver, laughing and clever, he brought change that was meant to keep order, but instead left us with a wound that never quite healed. Tsagaglalal—She Who Watches—was given a stone body so she could see forever, but her voice became something we had to listen for in the wind, or in the pause before an elder speaks.
