Margaret Bashaar
Wasi'chu
She is not a woman born from the desert — did not fall from the belly of the coyote, burst from the eagle’s nest. She does not grow corn on her body. They had to pry her from her mother — clamp her head with forceps and pull her into this lifetime. She knows there is a thread that ties her back to when she lived in Hell’s Creek, when she first stomped up on land, and if she can pull that thread taut she will be able to hear all the words she has ever said. There is a stone in her throat. She coughs it up some nights and holds it in her hands, reads a new language on it but in the morning she has always swallowed it again and she cannot remember why. She thinks she might bleed it out, that she might turn to the sun one day and it won’t burn her eyes, won’t turn her the color of a clean pig. She wants to be the right girl for this, wants to dance when she hasn’t slept all night, wants to make up for the 25 years she has missed and breathe in something clean but she cannot hold in her hands the idea of nothing. She swears she would look to her own ancestry if only her father had not been adopted, if only her uncle had not beaten her father, then his wife, then his daughter. If only her mother’s father had not done the same. I am sick and afraid to be sick. What is there to be learned from men like these? She swears she will not be the girl who buys acrylic blue beads, goes to dreamcatcher workshops, but still she finds herself running the tips of her fingers along rabbit pelts in the craft store, still she worries she is made of plastic, that the good grandfather will die and it will be all her fault, that his jaw will click shut, that he will suck his lips into his mouth and there will be nothing for it.
Margaret Bashaar's most recent chapbook, Letters from Room 27 of the Grand Midway Hotel, was published by Blood Pudding Press in August of 2011. Her poetry has also appeared in journals such as So to Speak, Caketrain, PANK, Goblin Fruit, and elsewhere. She edits Hyacinth Girl Press and lives in Pittsburgh with her husband, her son, and far too many typewriters.
