Alexis Quinlan
A few of the words
Here’s some language: sweet land, liberty.
Here’s a location we call mine. The mind.
Here’s a famous river in the back of the lot
just past the original song. Rocky banks
risky slope. Follow it north, pilgrim,
to where it runs at a trickle. Keep
going. The philosopher calls nationalism
irrational – sweet land sweet song –
but they made a word for it.
Here’s more: map, theft, savage.
Rage at the geographer, sweet. Here’s
a graveyard round which our freedom rings.
One day we’ll know what has happened.
Sweet sweet land. We will know again (mind)
(mine). Mighty is the word for that river,
ours. We will leap into its sparkling, easy
bobbing to its source, called Lake Itasca,
a name engineered to sound Indian
by way of Latin—veritas, caput.
Whose truth, whose head? Kaput.
We will change the name.
Note:
The lake regarded as the headwaters of the Mississippi
was known as Omashkoozo-zaagai’igan (Elk Lake) in Ojibwe.
In 1832, Henry Schoolcraft renamed it Lake Itasca by
combining Veritas (L.) truth and Caput (L.) head.
((((a name a white guy coined to sound Indian
Alexis Quinlan‘s most recent poetry chapbook, an admission, is a warning against the value of our conclusions [Exit Strata/The Operating System 2013] comprises a series of interventions on and responses to Freud’s essay, “Mourning and Melancholia.” More poems have appeared in The Paris Review, Drunken Boat, Rhino, Tinderbox, Juked, and Madison Review. She works as an adjunct English teacher at Fordham University.
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