I was born with wind locked in my tongue,
a song half-made, half-drowned.
Midwife said the cord
was coiled like a small river,
tight around my neck.
I came out blue,
gasping like a fish drug ashore.
They rubbed me with cedar ash,
cut the water’s leash,
and the first sound I made
wasn’t a cry,
but something lower—
like the hum of current under thaw.
I used to sing in the register of weather.
Pam laughed, said I was a castrati in another life.
No, Pam. I was a horsewoman
in the valley where the river
bends around the bones of our ancestors.
I carried **-Chunk children to school,
Dakota women to the trading post,
men drunk on corn mash and thunder.
I wove baskets from river reeds-
lightning stitched through darker bands
to mimic the storms over Spirit Lake.
At night we sang the Bird Songs,
those long traveling prayers
that teach the heart where home is.
When the soldiers came,
we hid in the limestone caves
and sang quieter.
Songs don’t die,
they just change their address.
When the city hums too loud,
I hear the buried river-
its pulse through pipes
asking if I remember.
I do.
I remember the small fires
inside my ribs,
how silence can be a kind of singing,
how grief is water looking for its mouth.
I walk to the lip of light’s forgetting,
half prayer, half river,
the river speaks through me-
blue, unbroken, home.