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.