In honor of Native American Heritage Month, we are proud to feature ten works by Native writers from around the country. Among the tales told here: an ex-con finds work at a doughnut shop, where he confronts the meaning of honor culture; struggling with identity, a young woman feels forced to defend her Indianness; watching her lover sleep, a woman imagines her body as a colorful canvas: “her navel is a charcoal bowl of figs”; the tension between modern life on the rez and the “old ways” espoused by his stepfather pervades the home of the young narrator. And in a verse from the final piece, the poet writes, “Grandmother drives up in her pickup. Stay, she says, for the singing,” and what could be better advice? Stay, and let these lovely, searing, humorous, brilliant pieces sing to you.
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Sherman Alexie
A Vacuum Is a Space Entirely Devoid of Matter
Humans are filled with more contradictions than bones.
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Kenzie Allen
How to Be a Real Indian
You’re one Indian and a fraud, flying toward Delaware.
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Sherwin Bitsui
Four Poems
The storm lying outside its fetal shell folds back its antelope ears.
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Chee Brossy
Sweet Juice and Other Poems
Chile seeds cough in the frying pan, smoke the house.
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Paige Buffington
All-American Biography
The coal-faced boy lured foals into abandoned trailers.
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Natalie Diaz
Four Poems
You roll back your eyes and drag me into the fathoms.
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S. G. Frazier
Two Poems
I waited in the car, wondering what fire or root cures rage.
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Ben Kingsley
Pick Your Switch
I root out a stick who will come alive for me like a snake.
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Morgan Talty
Food for the Common Cold
“I wonder what will stay longer,” Frick said. “Me or that headstone.”
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Michael Wasson
On the Aggrieved and Other Poems
By dawn is when our sky is full of every dead body we’ve ever known.