Louise Waakaa’igan

Issue No. 21 • Spring 2020

Suspended throughout infinite

discoveries, I’ve desired

to return to that god’s eye above the stairwell in six-mile.

I’ve forced myself to enter that dark basement hallway where

surrender was never a friend of mine.

I lose myself there, in that childhood home.

I needed my father and he wasn’t there.

Ever.

So I carry

cellular memories storing fatherless

echoes my heart shattered for,

ones I became an introvert for,

rebelled against my own body for.

This mosaic of scars—

individual burns and historical Indigenous horrors

buried deep throughout my mixed-blood lineage.

I resided my anemic body with stones and birch

bark roots from northern Wisconsin. I

drifted in frigid waters of Gichigami

washing clean years

of penitentiary sorrows, barring my isolated

and pale skin attached to elemental

properties of Aki,

sweet, sweet Aki.



Gichigami:  Lake Superior Ojibwe

Aki:  Mother Earth Ojibwe


Louise Waakaa’igan has recently been released after years of incarceration. Louise's work (also under the pseudonym of Karol House) has won numerous PEN Prison Writing Awards and been featured in several reading series' and in the La Paloma Prisoner Project.