As Though Their Minds Were On Fire
With the flower of one perfect idea
Boozhoo, indinawemaaganidog! Aaniin! That is to say hello, all of my relatives! Welcome to another edition of An Irritable Métis. With April at the exits I present a somewhat unusual edition this time around1, as I am both fulfilling a promise to some new and wonderful friends and sharing words almost entirely not my own. It gives me a lot of pleasure to do so and I hope it’s one you enjoy!
I’ve been spending more and more time outside as the season of longer days and warmer temperatures unfolds. This means time on my front porch, especially with coffee, on those mornings I’m home. It also means similar time spent wherever morning finds me on the road. Between these efforts, and making – truly making – more time to be out on trails and the like, often at the expense of other things, I’m beginning to feel like a poet again, just in time for National Poetry Month to come to a close.
What I mean by “feeling like a poet” is the sense of awareness to the world beyond the task list. It means looking for and acknowledging the return of all my bird friends and relatives, more who arrive at the end of their migration here every day. When we cloister indoors all the time it is easy to overlook, or even forget, all the lives that are being boisterously lived all around us, all the time. Recognizing this and reveling in it is what makes me feel like a poet again. Next up? Making – truly making – time to engage in the most recognizable part of being a poet: actually writing poems. I’ll get there. I’ve got one I’ve been flailing away at for some time due by the end of the day, in fact. I’m not very good at writing poems on request. I need to get better at that too.
Last February I was at the gates of Zion National Park in Southern Utah working with over a dozen wonderful people engaged in the act of writing poems as part of the Voices for the West workshop as organized by the mighty Torrey House Press.2 We spent a couple days together in that beautiful place discussing and writing poetry. It was enjoyable, and when it wrapped up I told everyone I would happily publish some of their poems here on my newsletter. Most, but not all, sent me some for just that purpose and I am sharing them here today, in celebration of nothing more than poetry and how it connects us. That’s the best part of it, isn’t it? Please take the time to read and reflect on these poems; some were written during the retreat, and some weren’t. I love to be sharing them here with you, regardless.
In the following, I’ve done my best to preserve the formatting as defined by the poets in what they sent me while simultaneously bedeviled by two challenges: first, Substack, for its efforts in providing a “poetry mode” when writing a newsletter, still isn’t the best place for it. And second, a couple poets sent their poems via PDF and trying to copy and paste from that is a nightmare … or at least it is for a person of my mediocre technological prowess and eternally beleaguered patience. Which is to say, anything confusing related to formatting is likely my mistake. Also, bios for the individual poets are provided … at least the ones that were provided to me.
Poets of Voices for the West, 2025
Protest at the Gates of Zion by Tony Alcantara The rocks don’t know what to make of the lines – one of metal, one of flesh – yet both moving so damn fast. Occasionally, one of the fleshy blobs zips over to one of the metal blobs then zips back. The sun shines on both lines: one line refuses the light, shoots it back; the other takes it in. Floating up on the wind, noisy blasts from a monstrous tortured goose. The squeaky chattering of mice. Tinaja by Tony Alcantara I’m everybody’s favorite – the water pouring itself into me, spinning and spinning, staying as long as it can. And all the four-leggeds, loping over the land to meet me, bowing their heads, stretching out their dry tongues, lapping up my life’s blood. Even when I’m dry, the wind slips in, rubs itself against my willing curves. My whole life, opening and opening, going deep and deeper, forever awaiting the coming storm.
Me, Portmanteau by Omar Bárcena (italicized words are to be pronounced in Spanish) I, like the two main places that I am from am a portmanteau. Born in a city whose name is the combination of the Spanish diction of the names of México and a California, and raised mainly in a town whose name is once more a stitching of the English diction of the words California and Mexico. My place perhaps is then the line that both divides and joins them. I belong in the stitching of their symbiosis; in the rust of its barbs and in the thin slits cut into it. This is the Salton Trough; a ditch cut by the friction of tectonic plates: the Pacific and the North American and by the once free-flowing waters the once-red waters of the Río Colorado A place where the Cucapá and the hot sun below sea-level, once made it severely hard for pale non-natives to settle. A place still harsh like it's rumored the Cucapás once were, and to my surprise, my blood is partially composed of theirs and of everyone else's who was once bronze here
Omar grew up straddling the border that divides two Californias. He has two collections of poetry published in Spain by Valparaíso Ediciones: Poemas desde el otro lado, and Naturaleza Urbana, he was a 2020 Pushcart Prize nominee for Flying Ketchup Press, which featured him in their trilingual anthology, the Very Edge Poems. Omar is @ArquitectoDefecto on social media.
FORGING by AJ Wojtalik my father is a blacksmith when I was 13 our family broke and he and I d r i f t e d but he riveted us back together by teaching me to look directly into fire and trust the heat to make art we shaped a new chapter with hammers my father also fought fire when it caused trouble my brother and I perched excitedly around the scanner waiting to hear Dad’s voice so when he came home we could tell him we recognized him even though it would take decades to really recognize him as a man who swallowed fire so others didn’t have to like when he left so our mother wouldn’t last night when a little boy ran bare feet slapping the winter concrete his blanket a trailing cape he shouted ahead to his father, “I’m cold!” and kept running until he reached the neighbor’s house waves of sirens I turned on the scanner and sunk into the flickering at my window with the voices who know what to do when houses burn when homes crumble hoping I can recall more art than collapse in the morning THAWING by AJ Wojtalik nostalgia is a red-winged blackbird vibrato echoing across morning’s breeze and sun’s swelling we are warm muscles under cold skin bare in the first warm of spring hot drinks and full-bloom laughter bursting through the frost
Of all the people at the workshop, I’ve known Laura Paskus the longest. Yet this workshop is where we met in person for the first time and it was lovely. As regards this little online project, Laura writes:
I don't have a poem to share, but this recent essay has the closest thing I've written to a poem in it (the part about the thrasher) and I'd love to share it with a wider audience.
I hope you check out the essay and giver her newsletter a follow. She’s wonderful.
Laura Paskus is a longtime reporter based in New Mexico. She started her career at High Country News in 2002 and has worked for print, online, radio, and television news outlets, covering the most important environmental issues of her generation, including climate change, wildfire, water, and the military’s contamination of groundwater with PFAS.
Most recently, she produced and hosted “Our Land: New Mexico’s Environmental Past, Present and Future” for eight seasons on New Mexico PBS. You can find that program on the PBS App or YouTube.
She’s also the author of At the Precipice: New Mexico’s Changing Climate and editor of Water Bodies: Love Letters to the Most Abundant Substance on Earth.3
Sandhill Red by M Waldron I You seem to arrive each spring with the cranes appearing suddenly at the moment April begins to feel like the longest month; at the beginning My discovery of the migratory patterns of Sandhill Cranes was coeval with my discovery of women How strange—to spend decades oblivious to patterns of movement, of color Unaware of my own ignorance Blissful discovery Heavy knowledge—both women and cranes leave II In the bar I refill his glass of Sandhill Red He draws a deep draught, turns to the person next to him, “we used to be able to hunt the cranes” Long sip “Then the nature conservancy came in and ruined that too.” Deep sip “Now we can’t shoot them at all. They just come in and eat all the wheat, bastards.” Long pull “They taste like the best turkey. Better than turkey, like brisket, like steak. The rib-eye of the fucking sky!” III We all know how this happened. At the end of the Cretateous some 66 mya the dinosaurs were rendered extinct We learned as children that birds are the descendants of dinosaurs I didn’t see a crane until after college Sandhill Cranes have been doing their mating dance for nearly 9 million years—three times as long as their nearest bird relative, small wonder they resemble their reptilian ancestors so much There are many subspecies of crane There is one species of human – homo sapiens We have been doing this mating dance for nearly 2 million years We have consumed the entire world and remain insatiable IV In the clear hindsight of the Anthropocene, ecologists call what once was – the American Serengeti – while fighting to preserve this modern sagebrush sea that I have come to love The cranes have chosen this former abundance, this shadow of the marshes they belong to which we see no use for, they have yet to turn into oil We bully them into farmland instead and if the birds are lucky the nature conservancy gets a slice where they can safely feed on their long journeys and yet, the map is not the territory; territory is a matter of acquaintance not ownership In this constant choosing between person or place the cranes have discovered how to have it all mating for life and migrating between places Won’t you come home?
For M.
by Kate Mikell
we ranged the ragged west tried to find the tallest peaks to touch the moon lay in the bed of matt’s dad’s pickup drinking beer & taking canyon curves at high speed blasting metal drunk
on the fantasy that we were dangerous & cheap tequila & other stuff (once birdman, flying, skied right into a tree it swayed so sweetly in the frame of scooby’s camera we laughed
& laughed) but i was too chickenshit for that besides by then i could tell my body
was unbreaking sixteen sticking to me in ways that spandex speed suits did nothing to hide
suddenly the jokes i’d pretended to laugh at were flung at me too hard to catch i realized they’d never intended to let me trade in my womanhood for a nickname. skiing is like love:
it hurt me but i ache for it. then in mammoth shay skied off the course hotboxed his car with burned-up hope got in a fight & broke the nose of some poor california kid i watched
the blood run heavy like metal filings heard the way he bragged about it later i was ashamed that i still wanted him–not the balled fist but the tenderness i imagined was buried
beneath it, didn’t want the danger but still needed it, felt weak without its iron in my blood. we walked around with six-foot-long chips on our shoulders sharpened with the stones
in our pockets pushed seventy in the downhill knew that when the crash came we were
done. skiing is like poetry: to initiate the turn you have to lean so far out over your own body
you feel like you’re about to fall. sometimes you do. last year jonny climbed everest
matt dropped out to work at a pot dispensary scooby’s now a river guide
can’t leave behind the feeling of the canyon watching over him birdman works
for NASA i saw him last new year’s with a couple other guys we drank a shot for bryce
who’d made it all the way was hurtling towards glory when a field of snow
smooth-blown polished & solid as alabaster cracked away beneath him like the booby trap
in an indiana jones movie. a fucking stupid simile. the hero is supposed to get away
not be buried
unburied
buried again. the saddest line in hamlet is “i knew him”
not eloquent but echoing with the dumb shock of death. we never talk about it but i know we all still do one-twenty on the freeway sit up at five am to watch the snow fall
straight-line an icy slope drink cheap tequila find a cliff and think about the jump
granma’s laughter after granma by Jerald Lim the (now) gaunt firmness of your jaw, skin flaps flanking aching gums and lips otherwise pressed shut, sternness that collapses into a scream and cackle, your open mouth has time travelled back to its half vacated state, table and thigh slaps splintering off sorrow (now) scabbed on white walls, and the gold cross below your throat trembles, as you fish around for the kitchen towel squares you have always folded so meticulously (even now) like origami to keep busy, in the pockets of a (now) oversized batik dress, pinching them out still with iron grip, and pressed to both eyes’ corners where i wait for longer periods (now), joy, a bus running late, sometimes whole schedules behind, but still i wait anxiously, for it is my only form of safe transport. travel into pumping heart that slowly seeps away between unpaved hurts to a forever child. granma, (stay with me now,) let me hold your glasses so you don’t flatten them in our delight. i have never asked for permission to write a poem after the nps protest at mukuntuweap i stand behind neon marker on card stock ‘crown trump king and elon queen’ — is this common ground in empire politics? one and the same monarchy pronounced with equal sardonic jest only one breath delights in misery while another delights in misery sunlight licks thighs i stand by the shores of the protest signage sea, my own precarity simmers — solidarity falling to the fringe of insincerity tenuous beyond the carousels of political memes i parasite the prefigurative joy and love, high fives shared with honking cars in line resounding in a cavern yearning for entanglement yet cordoned off like private land in a national park tape and marker read singaporean epigenetics misplaced respect for authority misgrown anxiety of disobedience i stand with signs of my own making — seabirds ferrying branches in their beaks turkey wings beating coppered newspaper on manzanita bark treading lightly after the sand bench trail at mukuntuweap let us imagine cryptobiotic time dancing between small fires that ebb and flow the boundaries of bodies — ten thousand voices converge in the mud, compressed into new stories, churning in the tumbling of sun and stars, disassembling by the paws and pads and prints of yet more. a dreamland of restful branches long estranged from their roots. melding into microbial then blink and you might miss the entire moment of the human stew that simmers on and on by the paws and pads and prints in the tumbling of sun and stars, disassembling into new stories, churning tentacles, shell, silicon, lightning, converge in the mud, compressed bodies — ten thousand voices of yet more. a dreamland of restful branches long estranged that ebb and flow the boundaries of dancing between small fires
Jerald Lim is a multimedia poet and conceptual artist exploring the intersections of language, ecology, and care. Their practice revolves around destabilizing dualistic hierarchies along the human/nature divide.
A number of you have heard me relate a story related to our relative, Aginjibagwesi, or the Goldfinch. It is a long story and I’m sure I will tell it again, but it begins with an Irritable Reader contacting me about a poem she encountered written by the great Mary Oliver. To close out April, I’m going to share that poem too … or at least the one I think it is.
A Couple of Recent Releases Worth Mentioning
If you’ve been thinking you need more poems in your life, these releases by two of my best friends are well worth your time and attention. You will be changed.
Your Mother’s Bear Gun by Corrie Williamson
“Reading this remarkable collection I’m reminded how during hunting season of my high school days, any number of pickups in the student parking lot would contain racks supporting rifles, likely loaded, ready to perform their lethal and essential business as soon as the final bell sounded. I’m reminded of the trail I hike in the fall where the remnants of an apple orchard, gnarled and returning feral, seems to drag bear scat up from below the surface of the ground, like overnight mushrooms, and how that time a bulbous black bear – reclined against a trunk, munching away and eyeing me – seemed just shy of offering me a crunchy bite of my own as I paused before sauntering on, chest strained with joy and love. Which is to say, Corrie Williamson’s gorgeous and familiar reflections are so tangled up with the landscapes of heart and wildness I’m reminded that they are really one and the same, and I emerge from the ice sharp reverie of her work certain I won’t experience so excellent a gathering of poems any time soon.”
– Chris La Tray, Montana Poet Laureate, author of Becoming Little Shell: A Landless Indian’s Journey Home, and One Sentence Journal.
Church of Shadow and Light by Heidi Barr
"Poetry is meant to stretch us beyond what we know or understand, and Church of Shadow and Light does just that. Heidi Barr is a prophetic poet and a kind of spiritual guide, leading us deeper into the world and thus deeper into ourselves. When Heidi asks who or what the Divine is, I listen. I’m so grateful for this book of poetry; I’ll be returning to its images, its essence, and its medicine again and again."
– Kaitlin B Curtice, award-winning author of Native and Living Resistance
Miigwech, my friends. I hope April was good to you – all things considered, it was for me! Here’s to even better for us in May.
In other words, not “on brand.” But what does that even mean? I don’t want this newsletter to be random and all over the place, necessarily, but I don’t want it to be predictable and one note either.
Speaking of, PREORDER THIS BOOK.
Water Bodies is a wonderful anthology, and not just because I have a piece in it as well!
Ah! Thank you for sharing our work, Chris! And for your wisdom; I am so grateful.
Your newsletter never fails to astound me.