And I kept it from you like a kill,
my name, my legacy, my shoulder
chip and the small hollow beneath

where I can be wounded. The Longhouse
I whittled to matchsticks, abalone
filling up with hair ties, Ute painted

coffee mugs and iron turtles a pan-flash
of identity, an almond eye watching
from between the white bookcases

and photographs of cities, orchards,
graves. A lonely ironing board
left to the street outside our old place,

candles I lit in Lisbon for all the women
I have loved. Animals who are no longer
with us. Animals who are no longer

ours. So much landscape I can’t
tend to, wide as a child’s face
and crumbled in drought,

rimmed in salt. I kept the Water
Lily, how Bear Clan was given
the medicines, Namegiver,

how she made me darker
with her words. The turquoise ring
and how it pleases the Spirits

to give that which has been
so admired. The sweetgrass
in my sock drawer, the exact volume

of air I can fit in my lungs and belly
as I try to swallow and breathe
its sweetness. Every bead, every

loop of every treasure necklace—
I kept porcupine quills
in my throat, I let the water drown me

every night in my river-bottom
canoe. I’ve been sleepwalking
since I got to this earth,

since they brought up the soil
and made an island, those who did not perish
in the dive. Since the island crawled

into a continent, I’ve been
shell and memory, calendar and hearth.

Kenzie Allen is the author of Cloud Missives (Tin House, 2024), which was a finalist for the 2022 National Poetry Series and longlisted for the 2024 National Book Critics Circle Award.

She is a Haudenosaunee poet and multimodal artist, and the recipient of a 92NY Discovery Prize, an inaugural James Welch Prize for Indigenous Poets, the 49th Parallel Award in poetry, and fellowships from Vermont Studio Center, Aspen Writers’ Foundation, and In-Na-Po (Indigenous Nations Poets). A finalist for the National Poetry Series, her work has appeared in Poetry, Boston Review, Narrative magazine, Best New Poets, and other venues. She is a first-generation descendant of the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin.

Kenzie received her PhD in English & Creative Writing at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where she was an R1-Advanced Opportunity Program Fellow, Chancellor’s Award recipient, and a TA in American Indian Studies. She received her MFA in Poetry from the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at University of Michigan, and her BA in Anthropology from Washington University in St. Louis. She is currently an Assistant Professor of English at York University in Toronto, Ontario, specializing in Creative Writing and Indigenous Literatures. Her research centers on documentary and visual poetics, literary cartography, and the enactment of Indigenous sovereignties through creative works.

This poem was selected as a 92Y’s Discovery Poetry Contest winner and originally published in The Paris Review Daily. It appears as the final poem in Cloud Missives.

Related Event

• On Saturday, July 26th at 7:30 p.m., Kenzie Allen will join poet Andrew Grace as featured performers at a Just Buffalo Literary Center Silo City Reading Series event also featuring a musical performance by happygroupppp and an installation by visual artist Crystal Z Campbell. Silo City Reading Series events take place in Marine A grain elevator, behind Duende at Silo City, 85 Silo City Row. Doors open at 7 p.m., and the events begin at 7:30 p.m. Books by featured poets in the series will be available for purchase by Buffalo-based bookseller Fitz Books.

The Poem of the Week feature is curated by literary legacy awardee R.D. Pohl.