Celeste Adame, Muckleshoot, holds a Master of Fine Arts in poetry from Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, NM. Her thesis, Lovers Landscape, explores gender identity, sexuality, love, basketball, landscapes of both Washington and New Mexico. She has been published in Yellow Medicine Review, As/Us: A Journal for Women of the World, hinchas de poesia, and Santa Fe Literary Review. She was also one of the poetry editors for the first two editions of Mud City, the online literary review of the Institute of American Indian Arts’ Low Residency MFA program.
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excerpts from the sonnet crown “We Follow Water”
burning through. Cedar, another silhouette of us
form bodies, through emergence. Snoqualmie Falls
chases erosion becomes life again. We smoke salmon
in high desert at daylight. Run to the plaza
where we sit and write poems back and forth
to one another through text messages of sighs.
She will find my heart escaping Orca pod gathered
beyond Elliott Bay. Each beat will release single letters
of alphabet. Pigeons fly past in search of
gun powder used to make the fireworks erupting.
We arrive with the tide, mixing ancients with
iPhone, potlatches with podiums, hand drums
with looped sample, long houses with basketball court.
iPhone potlatches. With podiums, hand drums
with looped. Sample long houses. With basketball court
we battle inland, past cattails where she sat with me
cross-legged. She finally told me her name, Autumn.
She took my hand and led me to the mountain
where the river begins with melting snowfall
at dawn. Where daybreak waits inside a bentwood
box and raven turns into a pine needle to be swallowed
to impregnate a virgin. To steal the sun and release
him into the sky, where animals will not walk upright anymore.
We stand to swallow constellations and ride
the river home. I will not let her go as I whisper these words:
I find a border, an imaginary line etched
the length of her body I trace with finger…