Arizona Poets is a series featuring 20 poets from Arizona in honor of our 60th Anniversary. These poets have all visited the Poetry Center and recordings of those visits are available in our audiovisual archive, Voca. Click here to learn more about our anniversary and here to see the rest of this series.

Sherwin Bitsui is the author of three collections of poetry, including his most recent, Dissolve. He is the recipient of a Whiting Award, an American Book Award, and the PEN Book Award. Originally from White Cone, Arizona, he is Diné of the Todích’ii’nii (Bitter Water Clan), born for the Tlizí-laaní (Many Goats Clan). He is a graduate of the University of Arizona and a professor at Northern Arizona University.

See more of Bitsui's work on Voca.

from CHRYSALIS

Bread dipped in gunpowder is to be fed to the first graders in that moment

when their hair is cut

            and a ruler is snapped,

and their whispers metamorphose into a new chrysalis of thought.

A new wing emerging from the lips of these Indians,

who are no longer passing thoughts in the paragraphs of an oil-soaked dictionary

but hooves carved into talons,

hilltops from which light is transformed into the laughter of crickets.

 

I want to remain here

where he doesn’t drink my lips

or remove the cocoons my eyes have become.

Rattles erupt on the north horizon.

The harvester unties her shoelaces.

I see the sun, eclipse it with my outstretched palm,

and dig away my reddening skin.

            “It wasn’t like this before,” I tell myself.

When I am thrown into a florescent room where the sink hunches

like an eagle claw,

it stops,

pulls the wind to a breathing space the size of a mouse’s lung,

and I am drowning in the air around my feet again.

 

Antelope are gnawing into the walls of the city.

And those Indians are braiding yucca roots into the skin of their scalps again.

 

I want to fall beside them,

count their fingers:

            five hundred and five rows of spilled blood marking the trail home.

The trail will not be followed again,

because there in the ears of the Indians

are echoes of the hissing belt

and the laughter of thieves

measuring the length of the treaty

with the teeth of the jury that is seduced by the glimmers of gold.

 

It is ash, all of it!

 

From Shapeshift by Sherwin Bitsui. © 2003 Sherwin Bitsui. Reprinted by permission of the University of Arizona Press.