Celeste Jackson is Diné from the Navajo Nation in Arizona. Her work focuses on establishing Indigenous ways of healing from colonial trauma and navigating the complexities of (re)claiming sexual sovereignty through a reading of the erotics and vulnerability in poetry/poetics, art, land, bodies, performance, media, and Indigenous Futurisms. Her work is featured in Cloudthroat, The Yellow Medicine Review, and Hayden’s Ferry Review.

Early Winter

II. come be my love in the moonscape the stars are fixed the clouds are dense the snow on window sills white like the chipped door frame not yet fixed like the mirror where we fix our makeup the cracks are alight with a GOLD sun when winter is over and the trees are GRUFF

IV. here—

I implore the wild
the wind the sea the salt
a GOLD rush of sparrows
in real time, back when

I. a river of sand blocked the door and the frame was white chipped old so queer compared to the GOLD walls and the blue picture frames full of GHOSTS bitter about water sad over rain so white the fences that circle round the house look GOLDEN look how the walls run GAY like the nooks of deep pink canyon walls—the wind that follows draws shapes the sand this and that way into the cracks of the windows in our little home

 V. —willow branches were fixed bruised stretched downward toward dark dirt wet from the winter’s GHOSTS leaping from the cracked makeup mirror—

III. I have GOLD;
let’s be honey-tied

VI. from natural waters, we well up GOLDEN sand still fixed on onsets of white pink hills where the wind uncovered us— GHOSTS picked clean by the dawn’s light.

at the bird’s foot

kitchen spoon turned upside down her

mouth;— an outburst of yellow petals kettled

together for soup I weep I weep I weep

these flowers color tongue

and cheek, dust her throat a little

yellow a white light shines pass the

kitchen spoon on the floor: she grabbed at

me; roses on the windowsill, pale blooms

scarlet on dark skin her tongue;—

laps at spoons on the floor drip drip

“sweep underneath the stove top” she said my

tongue, my mouth, sips air through swollen

lips; I don’t know what I speak of

a thing of a thing mar my cheek

mar my throat her mouth ate at me the

kitchen is red-clean and flints of yellow mar

the counter-tops while the spoon lays still on

the floor a light moves up and up

and up who taught me this? I mutter

I mutter to the mustard stains on the floor