Michaelsun Stonesweat Knapp, of the Costanoan-Rumsen Carmel Band of Ohlone Indians, is an MFA candidate at the Institute of American Indian Arts, by way of Los Angeles County, with a BA in English lit from CSU San Bernardino, and two AAs from Mount San Antonio College. Nominated for a 2016 Pushcart, and winner of the Muse Times Two Poetry Award, he is also a 2016 Periphery Poets Fellow, poetry editor for Mud City, and now curates the Claremont West Reading Series. He has published over 80 pieces across the United States and Internet, and his most recent publications are forthcoming in the Yellow Medicine Review and Red Ink.
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A Melody Hunting
Congress #25. Direct Payments to Indian Tribes Now Kept “In Trust,” by U.S.
Treasury. 1837.
Friedrich, Caspar David. Landscape with Owl, Grave and Coffin. 1837.
Wasps the color his whipping
eyes glow, when, in the garage—walls
sagging in— his mouth
a mass
too many mastiff teeth— he tells
me: he has enemies. Cheeks and neck
on grizzly fur, his jaw
to a snout
protruding—I imagined
the worst thing they could do
to me—
bones boil beneath
his skin, sloughing off meat
and fat to ragged deer legs ending
in boyish hands
with which he reaches out
for my chin—So I could make myself
stronger— the clinking thud
of bullet slugs, the clamor
of the sludge spewing
milk and mud caked
mouse skulls —
— and long owl feathers gray
vaned out in overlapping
disks along my spine, soaking
my T-shirt dark
with blood and yellow
ichor. A buzzing sound
only I could hear, I imagined you
dead, boy
Whited Out 2.
Federal Government. Termination of 48 California Rancheras. 1959.
Fontana, Lucio. Spatial Concept Waiting. 1959