About the Indigenous Authors & their Poems shared in our Conversations
About the Indigenous Authors & their Poems shared in our Conversations
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Casandra Lopez is a Chicana, Cahuilla, Luiseño and Tongva writer raised in Southern California’s Inland Empire. She has an MFA from the University of New Mexico and has been selected for residencies with the Santa Fe Art Institute as well as the School of Advanced Research where she was the Indigenous writer in residence for 2013. Her work can be found or is forthcoming in various literary journals such as Potomac Review, Hobart, Acentos Review, Weber, CURA, McNeese Review and Unmanned Press. She is a CantoMundo Fellow and is a founding editor of As/Us: A Space For Women Of The World.
My words are always
collapsing
upon themselves, too tight
in my mouth. I want a new
language. One with at least
50 words for grief
and 50 words for love, so I can offer
them to the living
who mourn the dead. I want
A language that understands
sister-pain and heart-hurt. So
When I tell you Brother
is my hook of heart, you will see
the needle threading me to
the others, numbered
men, women, and children
of our grit spit city.
I want a language to tell you
about 2010’s
37th homicide. The unsolved:
a man that my city turned
to number,
sparking me
back to longer days when:
Ocean is the mouth
of summer. Our shell fingers
drive into sand, searching - we find
tiny silver sand crabs,
we scoop and scoop till we bore and go
In search of tangy seaweed.
We are salted sun. How we brown
to earth. Our warm flesh flowering.
In this new language our bones say
sun and sea, reminding us of an old
langage our mouths have forgotten, but
our marrow remembers
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