Where the Ground is Uneven I Stumble*
after listening to Layli Long Soldier
It takes days to traverse.
She is beautiful her black hair short
wavy in back. Her eyes dark eyeliner and her
wine lips rectangular frames.
The lecture is stunning is history not dead
serious her delivery of each line.
The poem was long. They were hungry.
The men rode their horses days sometimes
in blizzard. I am stumbling and it is justice.
The lines a slow drip of truth direct to the veins.
The patient is almost dead.
Her book short-listed for a National Book
Award, as it should have been.
She has a cold. I watch her mouth.
The money never got there so they starved.
They starved. There are over five hundred
sixty recognized tribes in this nation.
Poems don’t have to be finished.
No one wants the pink bows. Bows feed
not one belly. Slow like a knife and she
watches the audience after each stop.
A swirl of black with white chiffon I think
wrapped around her shoulders
her upper torso is hidden. There is the podium.
Excuse me she says after a delicate cough
*Originally published in Aji Magazine issue #14, spring 2021
___________________
Nancy Christopherson
Review by Zeke Sanchez
“Where the Ground is Uneven I Stumble” by Nancy Christopherson taxes my ability to place it in some category or another. It’s almost impossible to do with this remarkable poem. She is talking about a black-haired poet with her hair cut short (Layli Long Soldier). Talking about a poet, letting us know how she feels about the poem. At the same time covering the tribal men on horses starving because the money didn’t come in. But there is a lot going on, “Poems don’t have to be finished” she says. So true, and it is true here. How to relate things dropped here and there, like telling us there are 560 recognized tribes in this nation, or what about “slow like a knife”? Could be about the men starving, or how the poem is read by the black-haired poet, or how all the disconnected threads are brought together in this poem that doesn’t have to be finished?