Wounded Knees
Sara Littlecrow-Russell

Friday going home on the train
Man staggers up to me
Begging change
I dig in my pockets
But my last quarters were
My daughter's milk money.

Woman next to me hisses loud —

"You know you weren't gonna give him no money
You just wanna see a black man beg in front of you."

I hear the ache of her knees
Longing to straighten up
After too long being bent
For richer folks with lighter skin.

I want to part the softness
Of my new winter coat
(bought with borrowed money
to beg for better work),
Roll up my pants leg
And rip the scabs from my own knees —
Letting the blood flow down my leg
Across the floor of the train
Into a 500-year-old story-skin of pictographs:

12-year-old girls
Imported for the 1900s sex trade
Forces to their knees to suck
The unwashed phalluses of California miners,
Cheyenne grandmothers kneeling on the ground
To gather wet fragments of their grandchildren's skulls
Playfully smashed by bored soldiers,
Puerto Rican mothers, knees bent on obstetrical tables
Begging that their ovaries be spared
The scalpel of Operation Bootstrap.

I want to bleed our collective histories at her feet
Until the steel wheels beneath us
Begin to skid and shriek —
"We all have wounded knees.
We all have wounded
knees.
We all have
wounded knees."

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