Ohkay Owingeh

By Aaron El Sabrout

Everybody on campus rub

colonizer foot & hands for

luck. In the middle of the quad

sea green man on horseback, cleared a

hundred Haudenosaunee towns


for him to be here, peach & butter

nut orchards, seeds from Cherokee

lands & every village a food store

food enough for a thousand

onkwehon:we for seven years.


Up in smoke. Rich kids burnish the

colonizer’s foot with hands for

test days & essays. At least a

rabbit’s foot only bears one being’s


blood. Tewa territory, a

hundred hands throw rope on other

horseback man. Latino arms

a gun, zia sun glinting on


the barrel & his forearms, red-

brown like the ground from which chiłchin

springs. Brown latino, maybe

Nahua, maybe Tewa, maybe


Maya defends shimmering shoe

statue. Worm winds through an onion

one ring at a time, hollowing

the body out from inside. Juan


de Oñate leads hundred twenty-nine

soldiers and ten Franciscan priests

to Ogha Po’oge. Tewa

revolt, defending eons of


waffle gardens & sage brush &

year round streams in the white water

place. Today rivers of Santa Fe

host dry dirt, rusty stoves & barb


wire. Coyote & Ectomi prowl

acequia bottoms finding

only twisted fishing line &

german shepherd shit.


Oñate’s army kills hundreds,

rapes thousands more & cuts off their

feet. Po’suwae’geh people

limp home, staining red ground with their


blood. Latino cocks gun & fires;

crowd scatters from Oñate’s plinth

& runs. Bullet tears through leg.

Brown man shoots white man over


monolith. Latino stands

over fallen protestor,

gazes up at ancestor

statue on ancestors’ earth

rubs shiny bronze shoe for good luck.


Aaron El Sabrout (he/him) is a transgender Egyptian writer, artist, and activist currently living on unceded Stz’uminus territory (‘B.C, Canada’). At the beginning of the pandemic, he was living in Ooga Po’oge, on Tewa territory. He is a 2020 Obsidian Foundation fellow. His work has been published in Mud Season Review, Split Lip Magazine, and the Texas Poetry Review, among others. His work has also been featured in The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 3: Halal if You Hear Me, and We Want It All: A Radical Anthology of Trans Poetics.

Previous
Previous

‘íin wées niimíipuu (I am The People/ I am Nez Perce)

Next
Next

Ode to My Vibrator