Leaving Tulsa

for Cosetta 

Once there were coyotes, cardinals 
in the cedar. You could cure amnesia 
with the trees of our back-forty. Once 
I drowned in a monsoon of frogs— 
Grandma said it was a good thing, a promise 
for a good crop. Grandma’s perfect tomatoes. 
Squash. She taught us to shuck corn, laughing, 
never spoke about her childhood 
or the faces in gingerbread tins 
stacked in the closet. 

She was covered in a quilt, the Creek way. 
But I don’t know this kind of burial: 
vanishing toads, thinning pecan groves, 
peach trees choked by palms. 
New neighbors tossing clipped grass 
over our fence line, griping to the city 
of our overgrown fields. 

Grandma fell in love with a truck driver, 
grew watermelons by the pond 
on our Indian allotment, 
took us fishing for dragonflies. 
When the bulldozers came 
with their documents from the city
and a truckload of pipelines, 
her shotgun was already loaded. 

Under the bent chestnut, the well 
where Cosetta’s husband 
hid his whiskey—buried beneath roots 
her bundle of beads. They tell 
the story of our family. Cosetta’s land 
flattened to a parking lot. 

Grandma potted a cedar sapling 
I could take on the road for luck. 
She used the bark for heart lesions 
doctors couldn’t explain. 
To her they were maps, traces of home, 
the Milky Way, where she’s going, she said. 

After the funeral
I stowed her jewelry in the ground, 
promised to return when the rivers rose. 

On the grassy plain behind the house 
one buffalo remains. 

Along the highway’s gravel pits 
sunflowers stand in dense rows. 
Telephone poles crook into the layered sky. 
A crow’s beak broken by a windmill’s blade. 
It is then I understand my grandmother: 
When they see open land 
they only know to take it.

I understand how to walk among hay bales 
looking for turtle shells. 
How to sing over the groan of the county road 
widening to four lanes. 
I understand how to keep from looking up: 
small planes trail overhead 
as I kneel in the Johnson grass 
combing away footprints. 

Up here, parallel to the median 
with a vista of mesas’ weavings, 
the sky a belt of blue and white beadwork, 
I see our hundred and sixty acres 
stamped on God’s forsaken country, 
a roof blown off a shed, 
beams bent like matchsticks, 
a drove of white cows 
making their home 
in a derailed train car.

--Jennifer Elise Foerster, poet, member of the Muskogee (Creek Nation) from Leaving Tulsa, 2013


Photo: With my grandma "One Granny" approximately 1970