MN poetry: Heid Erdrich’s ‘Own Your Own: Cellular Changes’
Winner of the 2009 Minnesota Book Award for National Monuments (Michigan State University Press), Heid Erdrich has authored four books of poetry and co-edited Sister Nations: Native American Women on Community, an anthology. Since 2007, Heid has worked with American Indian visual artists as an arts advocate and a curator. In 2010 she founded Wiigwaas Press to publish Ojibwe language books. Heid's current project is a cookbook from the indigenous food movement in Minnesota. Her latest volume of poetry is Cell Traffic: New and Selected Poems.
Own Your Own: Cellular Changes
Tiny robot tools remove
what doesn't work in me.
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Blue masks, gas, and a moment's glimpse
of a many-armed machine.
The healers anthropologists
called sucking doctors
could pull poison from the body
in the form of feathered frogs, hunks of fat, bone,
or arrow points or stone --
never leaving more than a scratch.
The robot doctors work like that as they
clear me, clean me, delete what's gone
crazy with my code --
never again to worry me, those
vaguely threatening cellular changes
to the smooth pink insides of imagination
where we expect our innards to work
in static and indifferent forms.
Except the womb, the best of us, the hot water bottle,
that one red organ we can make do for us,
the studio apartment where we
make the best of small spaces, make a home.
When it all goes wrong, we fix it. We give ourselves over in faith.
Blue masks, gas, and a moment's glimpse
of a many-armed machine shaking rattles
and singing before reaching in me.
I wake up without memory,
thin purple line of incision, a thirst, and a word:
S.H.-H.E. in sharp marker on my belly, indelible initials
so the doctors beyond the robot doctors,
knew, in the moment they cut
I was theirs, I was me.
From Cell Traffic: New and Selected Poems by Heid E. Erdrich © 2012 Heid E. Erdrich. Reprinted by permission of the University of Arizona Press.