Nonfiction

Like Independence Day

We had a garage sale yesterday to let some stuff go. It was like an Independence Day sale, or that’s what we called it, cuz my brothers said people buy more things for holidays. I put out my metal roller skates and old blue pogo stick and Big Wheel. It felt sad to give up…

Our Father: an Anti-Prayer

We watch them watch us, a family of four, a tribe “in the world” but not “of it.” Our clothes are shirts-tucked-in-to-the-real-waistline and modest-the-dress and the hat-cannot-be-backwards. We shuffle and do not know how to stand when our parents ask for the grocery manager. Can you turn off the music while we shop? At the checkout counter,…

Chooutla

Education got us into this. – Murray Sinclair I will go to the archives. What will I look for? Another place, simply, where the past speaks? I call Linda Johnson, former Territorial Archivist of Yukon. I tell her I am going to the archives. What should I do there? What should I look at; what should…

Unknown Territory

I find in this wilderness a being who only wears pants, has always only worn pants. Lucky Brand jeans for dates, Levi’s for swagger, Carhartts for work. A self who carries a pocket knife everywhere because I never know when it might be necessary to open the straight-edged locking blade sheathed in the polished, blond…

Fourteen Specimens

Autumn Blaze Maple October is warmer than usual. All weekend, social media friends post pictures of high school homecoming dances. Their daughters wear short tubes of colorful fabric held in place with hip bones and spaghetti straps. The homecomings I remember were chilly. The popular girls wore Irish knit sweaters that swung like thigh-length hoop…

The Woodcutter’s Daughter

For as long as I can remember, my mother wanted to get back home. She delighted in many things (Elvis Presley, migrating birds, black raspberry ice cream, figures of women and birds sculpted from stone) but for eighty of the eighty-three years she walked this earth, my mother was best defined by her desire to…