Not Knowing It Was Hard; Knowing It

American Means White, And Africanist People Struggle To Make The Term Applicable To Themselves With Ethnicity And Hyphen After Hyphen After Hyphen.

Sunk In The Grass Of An Empty Lot On A Spring Saturday, I Split The Stems Of Milkweed And Thought About Ants And Peach Pits And Death And Where The World Went When I Closed My Eyes.

The Men Began To Trade Tales Of Atrocities, First Stories They Had Heard, Then Those They'd Witnessed, And Finally The Things That Had Happened To Themselves. A Litany Of Personal Humiliation, Outrage, And Anger Turned Sicklelike Back To Themselves As Humor. They Laughed Then, Uproariously, About The Speed With Which They Had Run, The Pose They Had Assumed, The Ruse They Had Invented To Escape Or Decrease Some Threat To Their Manliness, Their Humanness. All But Empire State, Who Stood, Broom In Hand And Drop-lipped, With The Expression Of A Very Intelligent Ten-year-old.

At Some Point In Life The World's Beauty Becomes Enough. You Don't Need To Photograph, Paint Or Even Remember It. It Is Enough.

Some Native American Writers Enjoy Being Called Native American Writers.