Mission Folk Festival

I’m eating
an elephant ear
(fry bread
covered in cinnamon and sugar)
at a folk music festival
in the ruins of an old
reservation school.

These folk festivals, for all their celebration of diversity,
are remarkably similar. The same dred-locks,
smells, crystals, and arrhythmic dancing.
It’s easy to mock. But

with the full moon
sitting above a pink Mt. Baker
and the sun setting on the opposite horizon,
it’s hard to hold these hippies’
new-age sentiments against them.

The band on stage
is from somewhere in the South Pacific.
They’re familiar with things like reservation schools.

The patchouli stink is like incense
as the band sings about the regrettable results
of a great commission that lost it’s way.

It’s a strange setting for a festival like this.
A place where native culture
was systematically destroyed
not more than a generation ago.
And now it’s crowded with white people
wearing dream-catcher ear rings.

As I eat sweetened fry-bread
I wonder if all this is cultural misappropriation
or an awkward form of redemption.

Poets and Prophets

that awful man
made good art
and lots of it

it wasn’t beautiful
but is was an honest ugly
you could see
shit-stained truth
on the edges

when God told the prophet
to chew up and choke down
the word of the Lord
one wonders what it smelt like
when it finally came out

Oompa Loompa

the woman who made my iced coffee
was practically glowing orange

there was a cheerleader at my high school
who had the same complexion

we called her Oompa Loompa
behind her back
because she was a cheerleader
and thus any cruelty towards her
was excused

later someone told us
she had some type of skin disease

this was a few years after high school
and suddenly our cruelty was unexcused

but what could we do?
it’s not as though she knew who we were
and what we called her
behind her back
what good could an apology do?

I tipped my barista a dollar
on a 1.65 bill
and hoped that God was watching