\nBy Jennifer Elise Foerster
\nfor Cosetta<\/p>\n
Once there were coyotes, cardinals
\nin the cedar. You could cure amnesia
\nwith the trees of our back-forty. Once
\nI drowned in a monsoon of frogs\u2014
\nGrandma said it was a good thing, a promise
\nfor a good crop. Grandma\u2019s perfect tomatoes.
\nSquash. She taught us to shuck corn, laughing,
\nnever spoke about her childhood
\nor the faces in gingerbread tins
\nstacked in the closet.<\/p>\n
She was covered in a quilt, the Creek way.
\nBut I don\u2019t know this kind of burial:
\nvanishing toads, thinning pecan groves,
\npeach trees choked by palms.
\nNew neighbors tossing clipped grass
\nover our fence line, griping to the city
\nof our overgrown fields.<\/p>\n
Grandma fell in love with a truck driver,
\ngrew watermelons by the pond
\non our Indian allotment,
\ntook us fishing for dragonflies.
\nWhen the bulldozers came
\nwith their documents from the city
\nand a truckload of pipelines,
\nher shotgun was already loaded.<\/p>\n
Under the bent chestnut, the well
\nwhere Cosetta\u2019s husband
\nhid his whiskey\u2014buried beneath roots
\nher bundle of beads. They tell
\nthe story of our family. Cosetta\u2019s land
\nflattened to a parking lot.<\/p>\n
Grandma potted a cedar sapling
\nI could take on the road for luck.
\nShe used the bark for heart lesions
\ndoctors couldn\u2019t explain.
\nTo her they were maps, traces of home,
\nthe Milky Way, where she\u2019s going, she said.<\/p>\n
After the funeral
\nI stowed her jewelry in the ground,
\npromised to return when the rivers rose.<\/p>\n
On the grassy plain behind the house
\none buffalo remains.<\/p>\n
Along the highway\u2019s gravel pits
\nsunflowers stand in dense rows.
\nTelephone poles crook into the layered sky.
\nA crow\u2019s beak broken by a windmill\u2019s blade.
\nIt is then I understand my grandmother:
\nWhen they see open land
\nthey only know to take it.<\/p>\n
I understand how to walk among hay bales
\nlooking for turtle shells.
\nHow to sing over the groan of the county road
\nwidening to four lanes.
\nI understand how to keep from looking up:
\nsmall planes trail overhead
\nas I kneel in the Johnson grass
\ncombing away footprints.<\/p>\n
Up here, parallel to the median
\nwith a vista of mesas\u2019 weavings,
\nthe sky a belt of blue and white beadwork,
\nI see our hundred and sixty acres
\nstamped on God\u2019s forsaken country,
\na roof blown off a shed,
\nbeams bent like matchsticks,
\na drove of white cows
\nmaking their home
\nin a derailed train car.<\/p>\n
Jennifer Elise Foerster, “Leaving Tulsa” from Leaving Tulsa. Copyright \u00a9 2013 by Jennifer Elise Foerster. Reprinted by permission of University of Arizona Press.<\/p>\n
Friday, October 23 \u201cShe was covered in a quilt, the Creek way. But I don\u2019t know this kind of burial:\u201d Poet Laureate Joy Harjo calls Tulsa her home, lives there and, in subtle ways, lives from there also. As with … Continue reading ![\"\"](\"https:\/\/sites.udmercy.edu\/poetry\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/170\/2020\/10\/Tulsa-Hay-Bales.jpg\")
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