After “Killers of the Flower Moon”

Lily Gladstone confides she wore my great

grandmother Eliza’s blankets in three scenes.

I don’t remember my great grandmother, though

in a photo, aged ninety, she holds me in her arms.

The actress plays Mollie Burkhart, who lived

down the street from Eliza in Fairfax.

Hands out wide, Lily says Eliza had a broad wingspan.

She pleated the wool broadcloth several times.

Through an open window, wings outstretched, an eagle

owl looms toward Mollie’s mother, dying from poison.

My mother told me that owls in trees wailed

the windswept night before her father died.

Wrapping my great grandmother’s striped blanket

around her shoulders, Mollie asks her husband,

during a downpour, not to close the window.

Be still, she says, and listen to the rain.

Eliza’s blankets fold and unfold stories.

Into every pattern, I fly back home.

The Osage replaced hide robes with Dutch-

traded blankets in the mid-19th century.

I stop breathing during the night of film

when a murderer calls Osage women blankets.

While her husband injects Mollie with arsenic,

each sister is shot, poisoned, or bombed to death.

A woman, in a voice-over, foreshadows,

this blanket is a target on our backs.

In the quiet, after Mollie’s obituary

is reported, I only hear rain.

Outside the theater, silent thunderbirds

overhead spread dark cloud-spattered wings,

outlining circles across a broadcloth.

Inside each target, a hole in the sky.