Euro — Anishinaabekwe — Noli Turbare

Beauty is my irreparable and today I became geometric.

A faux linear figure that distills a skip trace of First principles.

In a whiteout of Atlantic snow banging stars into the femoral

vein of Euclid while rows of lavender circuits, all porous,

surrounded me. I genuflected before the hospital parking

of my father’s jaundice, for I am a good daughter of the colony.

The colony which begot the immortal heart of the markets.

Resource nursed all young bucks of the florets, a liquidity

I should service or else receive a lesser dessert. With my smudge

cleanse at the ready I find myself dispensing with the usual

future haunt of stability; a survival signaling my relationship

to time, or I’m out of it, entirely. Chanting hell as hair veils

my face as if this is a Western. Come polygon and I circumvent

the disaster, do not disturb my circles. Holy I went, holy

all around my head, the holy I am went careening down

the back stairs of this low-rise rental. Striated by the pinnacle

light of this city that has my blood pooled purple at the center

of its gravity. You can scan the ground from overhead for death

pits. I read this on the internet when I was dehydrated, lonely,

and afraid. Office plants all broad-leafed repositories

for cognition’s patent heart. I’ve gone and been abominable.

A column extended from the top of my head into heaven.

At the edges of my system an Anishinabek or Indo-European

projection of words my nerves could translate into the crawl

space of animal magnetism. White pine verticals send us up

as a stomach pumped by filial love. Oh, inconsequent curb

of my street I refuse to kneel, this day like any other, a cousin

charged with trafficking. Still waiting to be ordained, I make

mask of our features that are retreating. Plush pockets of rust

about another falsehood of water, a creek that pleats. I’ve gone

and got a blister. That summer a black bear’s muzzle was coated

in shellac from the aerosol can she bit through on my mother’s

porch. A half-century after my grandmother’s mother said,

don’t ever shoot a black bear, they are my people. So I continue

to speak more than this mortuary sunrise where I am only just alive.

Boozhoo, today is over.