(This poem previously appeared in oddball magazine on July 5, 2023.)

digital skin walkers back
              from the brink of extinction.
AI-generated Trickster virus
downloading crowdsourced
              personal data directly
              into cranium chips.
Virtual reality handshake
              agreements
between remote machines.
Fire wall trojan horses,
wait, bottom line like Weyland
              Corp cops tweaked
              on hard-wired neural implants and jack juice …
{Define, please}: ___
{definition: a cocktail of tar sands,
              caffeine drips and cyber
                            buffalo cum.}
Red terminal neon, poison night,
a soot that weighs down everything
              with the gravity of sin.
Any other city, and we’d both
              have fewer exit wounds.

(This poem was previously published in the Spring 2023 issue of The Yellow Medicine Review, a journal for Indigenous literature and art.)
 
I am a ghost --
an incorporeal apparition
often seen and not heard,
to move about space
and locked in a frozen
chronology
reliving my grief, sadness
and sorrow.
I scream – a silent
wail no one hears,
disparate rage,
misplaced anger.
I make no claim
and no one can claim me:
lost in a river of time
and only
a distant memory
long forgotten.

(This poem was previously published in the Spring 2023 issue of The Yellow Medicine Review, a journal for Indigenous literature and art.)
  
I am not seeking reconciliation,
Nor am I
            in the business of forgiveness.
You broke promises, truces,
            And treaties.
You push against boundaries
            and keep pushing:
Force marches to an invisible
            and moving finish line;
Hold us to impossible standards,
            impose assimilation
            while feigning compromise,
            without holding yourself accountable
for the pain, the anguish --
            damage incomparable
And you cry wolf
                        when we bite back
                        cornered, flayed, flesh
                        and fur
 
I am more than my skin color:
My ancestors’ wildest dream
More than blood quantum
and some mixed-race mutt.
 
More than the villains
                        of your John Ford fantasy.
More than mute savages
                        in barely-there buckskin.
 
I am the collective anger
                        and animosity,
the fear and grief
                        for elders and children,
                        Mothers, sisters and siblings
                        That never came home.
 
I am the sheer will to face a firing squad,
                        a hangman’s noose, a life without parole,
 
Because when you have lived countless lives,
died a thousand times,
 
what’s one more?