Green Beans in a Can, Low Sodium

Will Power. It is the deepest purple like huckleberries gnashed between bear teeth. The bears have been catching spawning salmon all day in the rushing river water, the stones beneath the clarity sing.

Remember the names of bears. Shash only to be said during the wintertime, stories reserved for snowflakes.

The flame of AO fades, the Blue Marvel People are dying. The latest cliffhanger of the emerald ring-bearer stirs my control over resolute impulse. From the nimbus clouds floods hail and rain, the dam in Crownpoint is ready to diminish. The big bodied water monster returns.

My ring is fashioned from silver and Kingman turquoise, a vein resembling malachite. My mother, shimá, is a silversmith and a rug weaver. Her hands spindle gossamer like shimásą́ní taught.

A tourist’s car overturns on the muddy roads in Canyon de Chelly, the driver goes into cardiac arrest.

This bear’s ears are rounded, a grizzly. There is a drunk Indin beating his wife in a hogan. This bear’s fur is white as polar icebergs. A Diné woman at the Tonali Lake chapter house is pocketing tribal monies.

There is a skinwalker terrorizing a grandmother. Shimásą́ní lives close to Shiprock, just over the hill, you know over there.

I am a poet writing in the marginalized canon of American Indian Literatures. This ring requires Talking God whispering in my ear, so I write verse. I construct iambs. I bear the burden of my people to be more than I am. This Koala is not a bear.

This inanimate bear is named after Teddy Roosevelt. A hijacked airliner rockets to impact Tuba City, many already dead ... Debris showers hot and fast, like a hailfire microburst.

I am there with one hundred gleaming jade coyotes running on the back of sheet lightning, with the resoluteness given over conflict by starlight. A skyquake shatters out all the windows of the Tuba City IHS hospital, knocking Natives to the dirt at the nearby swap meet.

This bear has no camel hump, it is a brown bear. Two coyotes knock a fiery fuselage from the sky, following streaming bottle rockets.

Another coyote shields shrieking sanis in velveteen dresses cinched with silvery concho belts, gripping a covered cradleboard—a child of the Deer Spring People. A piece of fastened white shell is lost.

Unattended burning mutton on the grill overshadows the acrid electrical fire dazzling.

A coal mine company gives no reason to honor its contract with the Diné. From uranium pits’ half-life, to sterilization, to Long Walks giving way to terrorism, Evil flees the will power of me being Biih bitoodnii. Ákót’éego Diné nishłį́.

Hear my Oath: One Two Three Jaded Coyotes ... Beware O Blight, my raging mighty light. One Two Three Kodiaks ... Bestow me grizzly power. One Two Three squishy beans ... Shimá, please enuff already!