The Four Invasions

Nick Estes On Indigenous Resistance And The Vision Of A Better Future

Indigenous people are protecting the earth’s lungs and liver. Without us, civilization would be even farther down the road to its own destruction.

Monotheism At Thirty Thousand Feet

Below me the world turned slowly through the night, unaware of the multilayered geopolitics my coffee-jangled brain was imposing upon it. I could find reasons to forgive Judaism and Islam their present-day sins. Christianity was another matter.

Murder Me Nicely

I’d brought one small bag. A squirrel looked at me and my bag and then ran off, I was sure, to tell the rest of the woodland creatures that a woman had just arrived who had no idea how to pack, let alone survive in the woods: Quick, tell the local serial killer. All that from one squirrel side-eye.

Maryam And Yeshua

Maryam: And then the soldiers — oh, the soldiers. I’d take my time with them. I’d do to them everything they did to you. Maybe I’d leave one or two alive so they could learn how life can be a long nightmare.

Yeshua: I tried to make people see that all we have to do is turn around, leave that whining precious self behind, let it go and see the wholeness of God’s Name, but people want magic and miracles and kings—

Unsettled

Almost fifty years ago 170 Romani families settled in the Polygone district of Strasbourg, France. They parked their caravan vehicles and, over time, constructed homes on empty land near an airfield, often using salvaged materials.

Inheritance

My great-aunt was not the type of lady to smoke / out on the porch. No, she lit up in her living room, and up / and down the stairs, and in her bedroom on hot / Mississippi nights with the windows thrown open.

Two Weeks After A Silent Retreat

How quickly I lose my love / of all things. I nearly flick an ant / off the cliff of an armchair.

Selected Poems

— from “Estelle And Bob” | My father kneels at my mother’s grave / to ask her permission to go on match.com.