Creeland. Dallas Hunt

      Nightwood Editions

      P.O. Box 1779

      Gibsons, BC V0N 1V0

      Canada

       www.nightwoodeditions.com

      Cover design: Anna Boyar

      Cover and author photo: Conor McNally

      Typography: Derek von Essen

      Nightwood Editions acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada, and the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council.

      This book has been produced on 100% post-consumer recycled, ancient-forest-free paper, processed chlorine-free and printed with vegetable-based dyes.

      Printed and bound in Canada.

      Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

      Title: Creeland / Dallas Hunt.

      Names: Hunt, Dallas, 1987- author.

      Description: Poems.

      Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20200354647 | Canadiana (ebook) 20200354655 | ISBN 9780889713925 (softcover) | ISBN 9780889713932 (HTML)

      Classification: LCC PS8615.U676 C74 2021 | DDC C811/.6—dc23

      for nikâwiy

      Porcupine I

      my kôhkom could pick up a hatchet with her toes fell whole oaks keep a fire for weeks trees speak to one another with vocabularies that could burst the grammars that house us roots and tentacles spreading reaching unfolding clasped branches like rough and clammy hands searching for irriguous dirt crumbling like empires saplings could topple empires if we would just get out of the way

      Cree Dictionary

      the translation for joy in Cree is a fried bologna sandwich the translation for bittersweet in Cree looks like a cows and plows payment eight decades too late the translation for patience in Cree is an auntie looking after four of her own children and two of her sister’s the translation for evil in Cree is the act of not calling your mother on a Sunday

      the translation for expedition in Cree is travelling twenty minutes to the only gas station in Faust, Alberta to buy a Hygaard pizza sub the translation for success in Cree is executing the perfect frog splash on your younger brother the Cree word for white man is unpaid child support the translation for conflicted in Cree is your deep, steadfast love for country superstar Dwight Yoakam (or, depending on the regional dialect, George Jones, Patsy Cline or Blue Rodeo)

      the Cree word for constellation is a saskatoon berry bush in summertime the translation for policeman

      in Cree is mîci nisôkan, kohkôs the translation for genius in Cree is my kôhkom muttering in her sleep the Cree word for poetry is your four-year-old niece’s cracked lips spilling out broken syllables of nêhiyawêwin between the gaps in her teeth

      Louise

      nôhkom nitânskotapân was born with one eye and one kid- ney

      for her grandchildren she worked her brittle fingers into dough, into the edges of fires, into frost-lined canopies, into dust she’d knead with flour and bake for us awâsisak

      “bannock weighs heavy on bones,” she’d say, and lick the lard from fingers that cracked with love and life for ancestors that linger, welcomely, and for the ancestors to come

      for white men, nôhkom nitânskotapân has awâs tattooed on her knuckles, her back hunched, vigilant, yet carrying herself with that looseness of being that glides on, and with, the wind

      nôhkom nitânskotapân strikes with the fury of a thousand aunties, whispering “there is no word for benevolent white men in my language”

      Kinanâskomitin

      thank you to the families that feed us, soft-footed near traplines and ambling for treelines

      thank you for the hides and dry sinew that cracks between teeth and gently punctures the skin

      thank you to all of the wolf willows and pin cherries that are just trying to make it to autumn intact, as we all so often are

      and kinanâskomitinâwâw to all the uncles that try and the aunties that do

      though, let’s be clear that trying is not the same as doing

      Dancing Yellow Thunder

      a shove off! creaking clumsily on one foot, followed haphazardly by the other, hang- ing in time, your hips swinging, staggering to a silence that reverberates through the hall.

      your forehead gleaming with sweat, mouth dry, parched, dancing differently than what fell from elders’ mouths.

      your soft, worn hands grasp- ing for the receiving hands of a(n) (inviting) partner, the lush manes of mares absent so the wind obliges, whirling you around, until you lie splayed on the legion floor.

      this is no sun dance, but you tap your toes in time with the tsk tsks, thrust into a dance from oblivion, a void with no history, another Indian emerging from the earth, steeped in mutilated self-worth, motivated, they’ll say, by endless, endless thirst.

      next time, i will dance with you, Raymond, and we will stomp our boots so hard we’ll create sparks that rise to the heavens, that call forth clouds and yellow thunder, and we will watch as they do the electric boogaloo— the smell of singed hair filling the hall.

      No Obvious Signs of Distress

      in Canada, what came first, the prison cell or the casket?

      colonialism is waiting eighteen hours in a cell when you desperately need a hospital,

      is when you(r) burst blood vessels are read as a night on the town.

      an RCMP officer is a prison guard is a school teacher is a hospital where you are sterilized unknowingly.

      your body is described, rendered as “collapsed,” “slumped,” burdened by descriptors so loaded that they undermine the sympathy they are purported to garner.

      settler colonialism is not the fear of dying but “the fear of dying alone.”

      an expert testifies, speaks strongly to how these conditions are opposed to “operating procedures,” to a past perfect: mistakes had been made, not that