LETTER TO CRAZY HORSE

by Roxanne Doty

Left: A 1934 sketch of Crazy Horse (Tȟašúŋke Witkó) made by a Mormon missionary after interviewing Crazy Horse's sister, who claimed the depiction was accurate. —Wikipedia. Right: The Native American activist Leonard Peltier—convicted in 1975 for the killings of two FBI agents—was released from federal prison on Tuesday after Joe Biden commuted his sentence at the end of his presidency in January. In a statement, Peltier said that he was “finally free!” —The Guardian, February 18, 2025

Innocence is the weakest defense
Leonard Peltier says, it has a single voice,
can only deny, while Guilt has a thousand voices
all of them lies. They said
you were resisting imprisonment
when George Crook’s military guard killed
you with his bayonet. Some call this murder
but language and land prevail.
 
The old medicine man says,
You could make a lovely mountain
into a great paperweight.
Can you make the monument to you
in the Black Hills into a wild, natural mountain again?
 
Today, I see people still longing
for justice and facing defeat,
the lust for stolen lands
still raging, white settlers still rampant.
I hear the thousand voices of guilt.
 
We all need your spirit now, Crazy Horse,
you, the last great figure of resistance
who inflicted defeat on the powerful.
And we need the patience and wisdom
of Leonard Peltier, finally free.

Author’s note: This poem was inspired by William Stafford’s “Report to Crazy Horse.” Italicized quotations by Leonard Peltier are from Prison Writings, My Life is My Sun Dance.

Roxanne Doty lives in Tempe, Arizona. Her debut novel Out Stealing Water was published by Regal House Publishing, August 30. 2022. Her first poetry collection was published by Kelsay Books in the spring of 2024. She has published stories and poems in Third Wednesday, Amethyst Review, Cloudbank, Quibble Lit, Superstition Review, Cagibi, Espacio Fronterizo, Ocotillo Review, Forge, I70 Review, Soundings Review, The Blue Guitar, Four Chambers Literary Magazine, Lascaux Review, Lunaris Review, Journal of Microliterature, The New Verse News, International Times, Saranac Review, Gateway Review, and Reunion-The Dallas Review.

ON NOVEMBER 11

by Gil Hoy

"Custer's Last Stand" by Harold von Schmidt. Image source: Smithsonian.

Veterans Day Weekend 2014

On November 11, honor the brave dead

from Afghanistan and Iraq, heroes against
German and Japanese imperialism

and the sacrificed souls in “the war to end
all wars.”

But also thank Custer’s soldiers
for not completing the genocide.

I went to bed and dreamt that Sitting Bull
saw Hiroshima and Nagasaki
in a vision quest

and then dropped an A-Bomb on Washington, D.C.

to stop invading Custer
from killing his women and children
like so many insects.

Upon awakening, I discovered that America
attacked Iraq for weapons of mass destruction

after murderous
pecuniary munitions manufacturers
crumbled twin towers
with their boomerang missiles

because recipients of evil often do evil in return.

Russian troops rhythmically
marched in the Ukraine,
a cruel video
beheaded a journalist,

ruinous bombs reined down
on rubbled villages of the weak,
and a bullet to a private’s leg became gangrene
as sepsis spread to amputation and death.

An obscure philosophy book said
that Custer should have refused
to attack renegades

because the Black Hills were the Lakota’s by treaty

and that God had ordered Custer’s men to lay down
their weapons or be shot for insubordination.

By river rapids, a sweating grimacing squaw
watched the blue cavalry approach as
she gave birth to a red son,

who drew his first breath,
wailed loudly and coveted white milk.


Gil Hoy received a B.A in Philosophy from Boston University, an M.A. in Government from Georgetown University, and a law degree from the University of Virginia. Gil also is an elected member of the Brookline, MA Democratic Town Committee, and served as a Brookline Selectman for 12 years. Gil studied poetry at Boston University, and started writing his own poetry in February of this year. Since then, Gil’s poems have been published in Soul Fountain, The New Verse News, The Story Teller Magazine, the Clark Street Review, Eye On Life Magazine, and Stepping Stones Magazine.

A YEAR FOR WEATHER

by Terese Coe

The release of methane on a large scale has long worried scientists. The greenhouse gas is 20 times more damaging to the Earth over a 100-year period than CO2, and is even more potent in the short term. Should the deposits trapped within the Arctic escape into the air, it could kick off a highly destructive climate feedback loop: The methane would cause rapid warming, which would melt more of the Arctic, which would release more methane, which would cause more warming. --Moyers & Company, August 8, 2014

It’s been a year for weather.
Popocatepetl blew—
the cloud of ash dimmed Gretna Green,
Des Moines and Malibu.

In Black Hills, South Dakota, none
survived except the Sioux,
and Stinson Beach was starving but
for grazing caribou.

Spurts of lava blackened Shasta
and on Winnemucca Flats,
fiberoptic cables crackled,
vaporizing technocrats.

The system crashed, the networks fizzed
as if there’d been a purge
the night the blackout swept around
the world in the final surge.

Survivors took to houseboats,
a quake hit Pocatello,
LaBrea tar hit One-O-One
and buried Kate’s bordello.

The ooze has taken life and love,
last going for a fiver,
but fracking and the toxins meant
we lost the last survivor.


Terese Coe’s poems and translations have been published in Agenda (UK), New American Writing, Ploughshares, Poetry, Poetry Review, The Stinging Fly, The Threepenny Review, and the TLS, among many other journals in the US, UK, and Ireland.