[written in 2009]
I am gonna scream loud enough to scare you. To make you cry, losing your breath, so maybe you’ll be in half the pain you put me through. And during that scream? You’ll listen. Tears bleeding from your widened eyes. You’re going to hear me.
I want to grab your frizzy burnt hair and use your face to flatten out the sand on the beaches along all of the Pacific Northwest where my ancestors fished before your people showed up. I want to take the knowledge you’ve tried to shove down my throat and pound it into my fist and use it to punch you in your throat. I want to build a fire. A giant bonfire. And dance around it like a savage shouting indistinguishables from the depths of my diaphragm.
I want you to call me uncivilized so I can snatch that word and throw it into your broken home with pictures of children who never come home where you do absolutely no work for no love and no life. I want your fake tan to turn to cancer while mine stays intact for years after one summer of sunlight without having to listen to you.
I want you to continue with your monthly hair dyes and thick black eyeliner- trying to mask yourself with something you ridicule. Something you will never be and only secretly wish you could be. Something I am. I want to rip out your tongue and dip it in a simmering pan of frybread oil so you can taste the sweet outcome of your people only giving my people four elements of corn, yeast, flour, and powdered milk. I want you to drown in the bottle of whiskey my people put in your hand every Friday night. I want you to choke the evaporations from the cigar you bought from my smoke shop.
I want to take a needle to your inflatable nose, since you say you can see Injun in mine. I want my blood to spill on your Abercrombie shirt and jeans and flip flops because you’ll never like me if part of me isn’t a stereotypical white girl.
I want your Marine husband to meet a beautiful Indian woman and not rape her for your satisfaction, but leave you for her Pocahontas lifestyle- but she’s not a real Disney Princess, according to you.
I want all of your freshmen students to see right through you. I want their hearts slashed alongside mine. I want the past to start all over and I want to be there to rob your great great grandfather of his pistol and use it to shoot him so you never existed. Actually, I want to use a bow and arrow.
I want there to be a reason for you to call me hostile, so let me give you one. And I want one more reason not to show up to history class today.
They call me Spitfire. 