Coming home from Carlisle School
to Rosebud Reservation, a big boy
after five years of haircuts, prayer, and standing in line.
I will find a job, be useful now.
I step off the train into Grandmother’s arms,
smelling wood smoke, frybread grease,
feeling my short hair clutched between her rough fingers.
Hoksila wan ktepi, she mutters.
What did she say?
I have forgotten the words.
That wind has ceased to blow in me.
Jaimie Wilson is a poet and fiction writer based in Atlantic Beach, Florida, where she lives with her children Ichiro and Mary-Alice. She is a specialist in distance learning and development. She is also a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College where she studied with Thomas Lux. Honors include the Lipkin Poetry Prize, a fellowship at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, and a 2022-23 grant from The Community Foundation’s Black Artists Endowment. Recent fiction is forthcoming at SoFloPoJo.
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