I never played lacrosse
but I often feel like
my brain’s been cradled 
in the throat of a stick 
since birth.

My dad’s goalie stick
is still on the basement wall
at the old home. He still
shows off the scar he got
playing in college.

People would ask him 
if he learned how
on the reservation
and he’d shrug it off in public 
then fume privately to me in the car
or the living room:

our folks 
never played lacrosse
and I wasn’t there
long enough to learn
even if we had

There are fading
teenage sketches
still on the exposed drywall
next to where the stick hangs,
the largest being one 
of an old man’s lined face, long hair,
eyes wide open, looking to my right.

I think I drew that face
one summer before
I gave up
that kind of pen forever.

I recall that summer
I rubbed witch hazel
over the mosquito Braille
of my sunburnt
forearms and calves.

The only way I could ever draw a face
was to have it looking to the right,
not head on or to the left,
and the face’s eyes
never looked into mine
or yours.  Always a little side-eye,
always indirect.

I never played lacrosse.
I’ve never lived on the rez at all.
I haven’t drawn a face in years.
My father is so very old.
I can’t remember how witch hazel smells.

I’m going to die one day and I 
will have to come at it faking all the way —
split roll dodge. That’s a lacrosse move.
I looked it up. I have had
to look everything up

except for the look in my father’s eyes:
always a little side eye.
Always indirect.

They treat us like tombs
eager to be emptied.

What they call artifacts
we called our lungs and heart.

Those things were how
we thrived, and more. 

We put our lives
into what they use

for pretty decor.
To them we were no more

than feathers
and a bank to be robbed.

Did they imagine
they could or would belong

whenever they wore
what they stole? 

They certainly took
enough of our blood 

to keep some
for their own.

They think we live
entirely in their commerce,

their fabricated mythology. 
They buy and sell

and take and fake
and slay and rape — still,

we’ve held back some.
It may not prove to be

enough, but it’s something
to build on and we swear

they will get nothing
of our new. We swear

that in their tombs
will be nothing but echoes.

They keep asking that old question:
which half of me is 
Abruzzese and which is 
Mescalero — a question

as old as I am and
maybe older if you think
of how many generations
before me had to hear it —

and if you think about how often
I’ve heard it myself,
you’ll understand that it’s gotten
pretty Goddamn old for me as well.

Tonight I’m looking at myself 
naked in a full length mirror
and can’t decide — where, exactly,
are my sections? Am I

Italian waist up? Apache
waist down? Brown left,
White right? Maybe the divisions
are within? Maybe I’m

a blend — always in flux,
swirling like coffee with
milk? Maybe there are
no boundaries at all within me?

Dammit. No. I seek the physical
proof tonight that would 
contradict that — some slight
configuration to explain me

to the open eye. I’m tired,
tired of living inside this body
that screams one thing to the world
and holds another back —

I’m tired, tired of my entirety
being invisible, tired of looking
like a lie to myself, tired of how
ridiculous I feel for feeling this way

on days when I am not secure
in full knowledge of myself.
They cannot understand, when they ask
me that question, how old it makes me feel.

One more night before the mirror.
One more night in search of myself.
One more night trying to answer
someone else’s questioning of how it is

that I am both and neither, and all at once
I break the mirror and see it as
the beginning of becoming visible
as a whole being, no lines, no seams.

1.
If you are above
a certain age, you no doubt recall
the commercial: him striding
in full regalia through garbage
to overlook a highway
smothered in smog and teeming
with cars, turning at the end
to the camera
and breaking his native
and noble stoicism
with a single tear
down his cheek. 

2.
I got a call
from someone wanting me to speak
about ” the Native American view of the world
of slam poetry.”  I told her she needed
to speak to someone closer
to the action these days
and shunted her off to
someone I barely knew with the excuse
that I was some years
out of that scene,

but when I think about that call now
I wonder if I should have taken it
with the caveat that what I was,
what I am, was nothing relevant
to the discussion she was looking for.

3.
It has taken me a long time
to forgive myself for my longing
to be obvious, to dress the part,
to be able to pull off some kind of
faux-Lakota drag, some expected
semblance of the Mescalero
I knew inside me.
After all, I said back then,
it is not like I look as good in that as
Iron Eyes Cody.

4.
Iron Eyes Cody was
Siciilan and Neapolitan, born in
Louisiana, y’all. As Italian as
they come. Played Indian in
over 200 movies and TV shows.
He denied who he really was 
his entire life. Died old
and died happy enough,
I suspect.

5.
I’ll take that call now.
You might not understand what 
I have to say if you can
be moved by a single tear
on a wannabe’s cheek; you might not
pick up what I’ll be putting down.

6.
At the end of that ancient commercial
a dark, rough voice intones, “People 
start pollution.  People
can stop it.”  

7.
I’m more of what you think of 
when you see Iron Eyes Cody
than you know. Hollywood
made me as much as
my parents made me — sometimes
because I believed and sometimes
because I did not and sometimes
because I rejected and was 
rejected.  

8.
His birth name was 
Espera Oscar de Corti.  
Mine is Anthony William Brown.

He was all Italian.
I am not. 
He played an Indian on the screen.
I play the half-hand I was dealt.

In the world of slam poetry,
some folks take stage names.
I never did.

What more
do you want to know?

Used to shoot
my father’s bow
in the backyard.

Had a sheaf of 
arrows, yellow shafted,
target heads like

sharp bullets, with
one white shafted one
chased with red — that

was my favorite. Saved it
for last every time I ran 
through them all, 

banging them into 
the plywood side
of the shed. I knew

the right grip, the 
two finger pull without
the thumb, prided myself

on form almost more
than accuracy — and one day
somehow hit something

off to the side of the target
and shattered that magic
bolt. I panicked and stared

at the splinters
for a few minutes,
then tossed it into

the woodpile to be burned
in winter, then still
some months off,

pushing aside the judgement
until later — but my father
never said a word. I am not sure

he valued that arrow 
much at all, but it was
everything about archery

to me: special arrow, fantasy 
arrow, the Ultimate I always tried
to be immaculate with when I shot

with my father’s bow
in my father’s backyard,
trying to hit the target dead on,

trying to make myself
perfect in a skill
I’d never need, a skill

from a past time,
a past existence, 
a fantasy I’d made of myself.