Making a Monument Valley

By Kinsale Drake

Victor Decolongon / Getty

August 4, 2024

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You rock with the rose quartz, the sweetgrass, the cedar. In the summer, our city smells almost like / dusk on the rez: The reservoirs are shallow enough to be the old ocean, the one that covered the / Four Corners. The Citibank building. Hook a right down Bunker Hill, the one with the city Indians. /Their ghosts shadow the eucalyptus trees. Let them haunt you. I like it //That way: Up the 101, thick scarlet vein. I let you go bumper-to-bumper, reclaim the land between /each car. Fuck it, you honk, Let’s be sovereign! We riot in the fumes. Smoke lavender, tobacco, weeds. /Logically, the land’s been dead a long time. The smog says otherwise, //The way it rises out of the Valley every other week. A long breath let go. The Santa Anas /carry all the scents back to us that they tried to get rid of. Inhale. A long line /of cars breaks the jagged edges. Saddleback. We stop the car, hot, off Crenshaw. /When you hop out, you swear the ground kicks /Just a little bit beneath your feet.

This poem appears in the September 2024 print edition.

About the Author

Kinsale Drake

Kinsale Drake is a Diné poet and a winner of the 2023 National Poetry Series for her debut poetry collection, The Sky Was Once a Dark Blanket. She is the director of NDN Girls Book Club.

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