Chip Livingston


Garbage Eagle

Adolescent by mottled wing, banded tail feathers fanned
in descent on urban orographic drafts between high-rises
Aguila Negra, Buteogallus urubitinga, great black hawk turned garbage eagle
descending to the big green corner collection container, talons click, slip, it
shrieks in flight, retreats, beaked beats echo from graffitied brick and street

Negro, moreno, morocho, yorugua, homeless
Indio meters away on the sloped concrete, asleep
Awake he also seeks the bin for throwaways, a thrownaway
cartonero horseless and without a cart, blanketed in leaves
Charrua living under the sycamore tree

 

Sacha Guasca

                        (for Sasha LaPointe)

 

leathery glabrous evergreen  l e  a    v       e          s 

dark fruits   e     w     m
                      l       o      e
                        o       o      m
    n       d       b
      g        y       r
         a                a
            t                 n
              e               o
                d                u
             s

tubular flowers  p
      e
         n          l o
d u          u
       s

s a c h a w o r m        
touch o f  t h e  m  o  u  n  t 
teyú isipó                                 sacha huasca
blooms a  l  l   y  e  a  r
wild  v i  n  e  o  f  t  h  e  m  o  u  n  t  a  i  n

Jo’ Jo’ Lon’ Fah

Jo’ jo’ lon’ fah, your name almost metrical.
Great grandmother Horse Forted, Catawba Creek’ed.
Appalachian flower mountain rooted. Uprooted.
Susannah Hosford Hadjo Taylor, Jo’ jo’ lon’ fah.
Little green plant that grows by the river.

Chip Livingston is the mixed-blood Creek author of the poetry collections Saints of the Republic (January 2023), Crow-Blue, Crow-Black, and Museum of False Starts, as well as a novel and story/essay collection. Chip is the editor of Love, Loosha: The Letters of Lucia Berlin and Kenward Elmslie (November 2022). His poems have appeared in Poem-a-Day, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Cincinnati Review, and other journals and anthologies. Chip teaches in the low-rez MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He lives in Montevideo, Uruguay.

ISSN 2472-338X
© 2022