The Greenhouse
This was my first winter, when the world grew stiff
and brilliant-white. Nothing was familiar
except the desert rooms, so I’d stalk the rows
of spiny Latin names between my classes
until my sweater-neck
collected sweat. I hung around the orchids,
the insectivores, the cacti. Prickly pear,
the great saguaro. I missed the chollas
most of all. My grandmother’s house nestled
in their shade, but here they were,
two thousand miles from where she lived.
They are quiet subjects,
easily uprooted. And here I swam
beneath the heat lamps in a year that nearly
brought the roof down
with snow. What did I know then
of how the earth back home slumps around each absence
it cannot fill? How the shallow graves gape
for missing seeds until
they are swallowed by rain.
Your Return
Last night we fought
again in my dreams.
It’s funny how
when we do this,
our small step-dance,
you only speak
in Navajo and I
understand. This time,
it was the egg-blue
kettle or tóshchíín pot
left on the stove
too long, bottom
roasted black. Or
my favorite dog
you’d kicked at,
maybe a bit too hard,
like the time you swung
to save the last chicken
and your water
broke and my father
cried out from
the window. You
never said I love
you after we fought
like this. But
in my dreams, we
cry at the table
afterwards,
and it is almost
like drowning
together
until I wake up
gasping,
my mouth wet
with tears,
thinking
the sound
of the kitchen
door opening
is you,
running
from the table
to the dog
closing its heavy jaws
on the rooster,
yelling
hágo, shhh!
come here,
come here.
Kinsale Drake (Diné) is a writer and performer whose work has appeared in the Adroit Journal, Yale Literary Magazine, TIME, and elsewhere. She is an In-Na-Po Fellow, and the winner of the J. Edgar Meeker Prize for Poetry and the YIPAP Award for Storytelling. Her work is published or forthcoming in New World Coming (Torrey House Press, 2021), The Languages of our Love (Abalone Mountain Press, 2022), and her zine Hummingbird Heart (Abalone Mountain Press, 2022).