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.