Heritage
I have ice
in my arteries.
I imagine
icicle veins
where my bones
are white-yellow
like pissed-on
snow, & my father
has told me a thousand
times of my Arctic heart,
how it is melting & how we
are as endangered as wood bison
& Eskimo curlew, how the tundra
has been turned into the 2018 Toyota Tundra
& the Saami name has been usurped by something as evil as the
‘Sporting Arms and Ammunition Manufacturers’ Institute’ with its sick
hacktongue hate that reminds me of the painful opening of the 1937 film A Star is Born,
the unnecessary Techniracist rant against Indians, and I want to yell that
I have a voice
in my arteries
I imagine
icicle megaphones
where my bones
are heard
and not pissed on
by the now, & my father
isn’t strangled by a thousand
years of history, its heartless heart,
how we are melting & how we
are melting & how we are melting
Link to Table of Contents: March 2018, Decolonization Issue
Ron Riekki wrote U.P.: a novel and edited The Way North: Collected Upper Peninsula New Works (2014 Michigan Notable Book), Here: Women Writing on Michigan's Upper Peninsula (2016 Independent Publisher Book Award), and And Here: 100 Years of Upper Peninsula Writing, 1917-2017 (Michigan State University Press, 2017). Upcoming books include Undocumented (Michigan State University Press, co-edited with Andrea Scarpino), Posttraumatic: a memoir (Four Chambers Press/Hoot ‘n’ Waddle), and yet-untitled books (with McFarland, co-edited with Jeff Sartain; and with Wayne State University Press, co-edited with Yassir Morsi). 
