No More the Tongue of the Bell
by Emerald GoingSnake
Detail of photograph by Danielle Shandiin Emerson
On the drive: windows, fog,
our breath collectively deepening
the already blue shadow
beneath us: long sighs, rabbit
tracks in snow, our silhouette:
the only indication
of day slowly breaking
over I-25. We sit on
a roof, our hanging boots
stained white by blue
salts we trudge through, our
fingers warmed by a joint lit
by match, the last
of the lighter fluid burned the night
before. It was almost spring then,
eve’s sky almost the same
color as the clamshell I dream
you emerged from: mountains
still in the far distance: dark tress
strewn along the sheet: my hand,
reaching.
Emerald GoingSnake is a lesbian poet from the Giduwa and Mvskoke nations in Oklahoma. She was a 2023 and 2024 Indigenous Nations Poets Fellow and received the 2024 Maureen Egen Writers Exchange Award for poetry. Her work has been shared in Poets.org, Tribal College Journal, Terrain.org, Poetry for All, and elsewhere. Emerald has a BFA in Creative Writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts and currently lives in St. Louis, Missouri.