#language is incomplete

 I do talk about this simultaneity in a variety of poems within the collection. In the poem “Buffalograss,” I talk about the Diné word for eye hardening into the word for war. I learned this from my father after he was talking with me about the word anaa’ and how it can be translated into eye or war. He said your eye becomes a shield against the evils that we see in our lives. I then asked the question about desire and imagined a speaker seeing a man naked for the first time. Is his eye-shield protecting him from this? What about this desire turns into war? What needs saving in this situation? The energies of war and desire swirl around this speaker and this man. The poem being in couplets only thickens this tension within this moment. This moment where desire can turn into destruction so easily because men desiring men is seen as evil, as wrong.

The first image, a little girl’s body pulled out of the rubble, I strike from the poem. Let her rest. Language is a failed state. The second image my own body stripped and hung by my fingers, deprived of their nails, piled neatly on a nearby table. This image I keep; the poem is a space to rehearse for the future.

 and I, farthest away, choose a new name my grandmother cannot pray for. I have stolen language. nana cannot pronounce Charlie​​ when she prays in Spanish. I love her and cannot decide not to, even when she prays wrong. transition and translation or transnational trauma hold hands. I know the power of naming things. I often wish I didn’t.

The two principal words in use in Latin were cutis, which signified the living skin, the skin that protects, that expresses and arouses and that is the subject of care and beautifying attention. Pellis, by contrast, is the dead, the flayed skin. It is the word used for animal skins, and evokes disgust, disgrace and horror. Once scoured away from the body, the human or animal skin becomes simply a hide, deader than a corpse, a corpse’s remnant, the corpse of a corpse.