A Sickness
Thinking up life’s brevity, once more he conjured up the blossom of the palm. –R. Akutagawa, 6. Sickness
in a guttural hesitation, I scramble for an English dictionary,
much like a glottal stop, I look up the following words,
………ké bichį gúúlí’í: leather boots with a toe guard,
………haada’ał: to sing forcibly,
………tł’u łibáyí: medicinal blessing herb, twelve inches to two feet tall, greyish
………green color with a musty smell, similar to mildew but sweeter, its potency
………is better when the leaves just sprout, there is more to this, than it being just
………a plant,
in this hesitation, I clamor to annunciate these sounds,
but in my imagination, the words only came out as gibberish—
I tighten my hands and eyes and roll back my tongue, to form
the box shape with my larynx and loosen the forgotten lingual lineage
to shake the blackened voices from my sputum, to loosen the flowing
blood identity unable to connect voice to body, because I know
now, and discovered now, how blindly I acknowledge
…………………………………………………………………………..the bloodshed involved
Corpse
He stared at the body. — R. Akutagawa, 9. Cadaver
in my family, there has always been a taboo about handling
the dead
one autumn afternoon I walked down a dim slow hallway,
passing many locked doors, here was a hush to the intermittent
lights, telling secrets that lingered behind each door, autumn
waits outside the building, but leaves me with the lurid stench
of old plastic bags left out in the sun, too long
the room was down stairs, where she laid, tucked away in a grey
soundless room, she lays quieter than she was, a gaunt soundless
toe-tagged shell of a woman, nothing but a small aiming frame
in that room, she absorbs the cold table under a twinge light
dissolving the blue clotting cloth that covered her, the wedge
in her chest cavity whispers the surgical precision in passion
as I gazed at her suffocated finger tips and greyish bile color,
the unwillingness in her dermis somehow meant murder,
validated the availability of consenting cadavers
Vengeance
That the cruel urge was in him, he could not deny…… —R. Akutagawa, 38. Revenge
I refuse to call him father—
no one will ever understand,
in the many compartments we called home,
they just became sections which added
to the partitions of a house, maybe also, in our relationship
I only guessed, he did not know how to be a father,
let alone how to recover as a man,
……………………………………………………………..—forget the human part
not having any biological sons, we three were a threat to him,
that one day, we would mature and challenge his dominance,
…………………………………….it eventually happened, like I had predicted—
leaving one a drunk, one dead, and I, a lonesome, wrought out writer,
he and I never speak anymore—
we tried mending our relationship, but like mythology, it became supposed,
since our only failed attempt to reconcile a kind of kinship,
I now only acknowledge a voiceless violence,
………………………………………………………………………….a stoic stalemate—
© Crisosto Apache
Crisosto Apache, originally from Mescalero, New Mexico, on the Mescalero Apache Reservation, currently lives in the Denver metro area in Colorado, with his spouse of seventeen years. Crisosto’s debut collection GENESIS stems from the vestiges of memory and cultural identity of a self-emergence as language, body, and cosmology. He is Mescalero/Chiricahua Apache, and Diné (Navajo) of the ‘Áshįįhí (Salt Clan) born for Kinyaa’áanii (Towering House Clan). He holds an MFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts. His website is http://crisostoapache.com.
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