Aimee Inglis

Hotuuknga, present day

Before the hills started burning
my childhood was a fire
in the sky every night an
explosion of color
bursting           from the center
of the happiest place on earth

Orange skies replaced orange groves
shrouding        the lights
we looked to for understanding, now
thick blood of climbing milkweed spills
over sagebrush   in the heat
leaves of the alkali mallow   brown and curl
waiting            for the rains

Suppose the fire is who we are now
what stories       can you tell
with a finger
cutting             across
the layer of ash            on a car window

The Center Line*

of such streets
approved
at the expense
of such persons owning
or controlling
the sidewalk

obnoxious vegetation
directed
from the center line
of such property
eradicate
and remove
all weeds
up to the center line
eradicate and remove
such persons

directed, from the sidewalk
from persons who own
or control
the streets

*Words borrowed from the text of City of Anaheim ordinance #94 5-22-1924
passed by the KKK-controlled city council.

Contested Territory

1924

Valencia Oranges gain fame in rows dug, trees planted, fruit picked and packed by Natives and Mexican-Americans, who were here before the groves.

In the park, the KKK celebrates victory with an elaborate fireworks display, after the experiment of their election to the Anaheim city council succeeds in a majority. Airplanes circle overhead rows of palm trees flashing out in electric lights the letters "K.K.K."

On the grounds of the baseball field, a huge cross nearly thirty feet high, and several other smaller crosses are ignited and left to burn throughout the evening. The wives and children of Klansman pass out literature to attendees.

They test the waters. They remove the American flag from the center of town to the park, citing a traffic hazard. The bare space in the center of town is a reminder and a question: what else can go missing.

2016

A century later, the KKK comes back to the same park to test a White Lives Matter rally.

Mouths open, veins emerging from flexed forearms, a white man with a Confederate flag patch on his arm and a Black man pull at two ends of an American flag. Blood is spilled on the smooth white side-walk. The palm trees and juniper hedges, a woman in fishnets recording on her phone and three Brown men witness. Next one of them is stabbed with the decorative pointed metal end.

I post that I'm glad the Klan was made to feel unwelcome. Two high school friends disagree, saying the protestors incited violence. Over time we realize this was an experiment.

2020

There is one, dying, orange grove left.

The first Indigenous Peoples’ Day celebration is held in Anaheim. Participants walk down to the river carrying the flag of the Gabrielino
/Tongva Nation. This is not a test.

The Santa Ana River watershed should be home to the kit fox, the grizzly bear, which is on the state flag, and the gray wolf. Instead, settlers put the images of animals they’ve driven from the land on their flags. They name the streets after what was once alive here,    displaced by pavement and Bermuda grass.

The Indigenous man says to the press about their strategy, We’re going to be running to the river down Lincoln Avenue. That’s where we’re going to have food.

Aimee Inglis (WahZhaZhe/Osage Nation) is a queer community organizer and cultural worker rooted in California. She has worked in social movement organizations for housing and climate justice for over a decade. She tends her ancestral foods and herbs garden, practices herbalism, is a tarot reader, songwriter, and poet. She is active with the Northern and Southern California Osage diaspora groups and in her hometown of Anaheim towards systems of transformative justice. She is currently working towards an MFA in Creative Writing, Poetry, at the Institute of American Indian Arts.

ISSN 2472-338X
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