Joshua Whitehead - Making Love with the Land

I AM READING Ocean Vuongs On Earth Were Briefly Gorgeous and I let the words find me because the body always knows better than the mind does; muscles remember, they witness, like trees, riddles etch disease, and I am weeping willow, crying seeds and dripping saline from my hair (this is how I got my name, yknow?). Or consider how the cambiums of trees will warp a bullet civilly, make room for the wound in the structure of their being, crown themselves with floraand I am singing starling. Ocean asks me, Who will be lost in the story we tell ourselves? Who will be lost in ourselves? A story, after all, is a kind of swallowing. Feel the roots of me, an ecosystem of painI am anthropic in the desert of my being. Do you feel how much the winds have dried my tendrils? Feed me, water me, nurture me. I would be lying if I didnt say I too want to swallow you in this story I call essay, essay I call livelihood, life I pretend to call my own. I dog-ear Oceans page and make an animal of story, I am looking for a wilderness in the act of being wild; I, here, a rez dog. I havent seen you in a dogs age, by which I mean I havent seen myself in years.

I am sitting on the hills of Dover, a space I rely on too heavily these days; the afternoon sun licking my shoulders, masseuse to the marks that stretch from the child-me who still fits inside me, and I have only just begun to find him againthat wild ancestral dream. People walk past me, staring: there I sit alone, barefoot, feet stroking the prairie grass and thistles, pricks not knowing the width of my soles. I cannot be harmed in this moment, by which I mean, I cannot afford to be. I puff a cigarette, curtail the smoke around the width of my neck, which remembers the lace of fingers around ita finger trap, a gag toy. I let the smoke burn away the oils of your pads, which seed deep into me. I listen to Maggie Rogerss Back in My Body on repeat, tilting my cheeks to the sun, let psim kiss them into roses and I am blooming flower; you, a shrike to my stamens. I hold myself as if I were a babe, bare legs with thin hairs wrapped up into my chest: I, a papoose. As for those who stop and gawk at a lone NDN sitting in the long grass, the other you of this story texts me: Theyre just stunned by your beauty in the sun. I tell you that if they are, its entirely for me todayI am majesty and my body is a living cornucopia. I eat my own seedswhich isnt to say I consume myself, for once, but rather that I wilt my pain into nutrient, and I am ouroboric. My hair, which I model on Steve Harrington, flails in the wind, to the point where I look Medusan in this Mohkinstsis light. I look at the yous who have harmed me in ways big or small, and I will you all to stone, carry you like gall in the bladder of my being and expunge you in the beautiful delight of a well-deserved urination. I am a body not needing to be owned. Instead, I am owed, and no man can consume, let alone hold, my plurality in this zipper I call a body. Or maybe I mean to say that here, in this field, hair a zephyr of raze, I become tim, dog, relinquished from the prison-house of the now, and I bark horror back into that doghouse while I rest among the multitudes.

I am a rez dog in this moment, a vicious sight.

I read reports of rez dogs, of how moniyw come to steal them, beef jerky in hand, lure them into a car and drive off to transplant them into suburbia. I think of my three sisters, who have been thrown into a pot of soup. I am looking for them; have you eaten? I imagine those rez dogs strapped in the back seat of a Volvo watching the horizon recede, and their found family howling into the night, Heck, where are you? In this vignette, I am the rez dog and you are the driver, and its a hot July evening during the Calgary Stampede. The windowpanes sweat, and my tongue is panting for moisture. My skin aches to be touched, but, like a frogs, it weeps when you lay a hand upon my back. You grab me by the leash you have locked around my neck, force me close, my whiskers receding from your rank breath, your tongue the scent of fermentation, and I, my own muzzle. You promise me companionship and I bow to your feigned generosity, if only because the skyline is a dark ring and tipskw psim cannot see me here. Already, I am strategizing survivability amongst the abandoned buildings, looming like spectres in the peripheries of my vision because I am trained to stare at you. Hand tightened around my collar, you bring yourself into me with the force of a bookbindereven this assemblage of sound drips with violence and I am wet with ink. When you are done, you promise me a home, in its largest connotations, and I reassemble done as doom, home being a torture chamber, a cage, kennel, the terrible weight of pounds. Your body expunged, you smile a gluttonous grin, and I paw the door of your vehicle, escape into the night. I am feral in this delight, having returned from the throes of entrapment and survived, fleeing into the safety of a transformed me. I enter the vomitorium of who I am and hack up severance, lick the salty rue clean to chew the bone of you. I howl for my kin, who rush to my side. Dont underestimate me, wendigo, I have chewed larger men than you into dust, blown through monuments, pissed on flagships, and you are only six inches of a man pretending he is ten. Together, a pack, we crush bone into fracture, crunch calcium into slop, will you the smiling death, a sudden syndrome, that slow necrosis.