GERONIMO’S BONES

Back to the land of pure evil that Nasdijj revisited previously (The Boy and the Dog Are Sleeping, 2003, etc.), for no other word can describe his youth.

Yet here, readers will also witness an incantational summoning, as in a streaming prose poem, of the lifelines that saw Nasdijj and his brother Tso through. There was a grandfather and there were the prostitutes his father brought home, each of whom offers advice and protection against a cold, mad father: “What he took from us was any enjoyment or delight we might have had at any time in our lives upon this earth.” Their father was a raging and enraged alcoholic who beat them mercilessly and raped them. “He swore he loved me. But it wasn’t true. You cannot love the thing you would destroy.” His mother, a Navajo and also an alcoholic, “loved us. Imperfectly. But she loved us.” She died when he was eight; that left them, quite unfortunately, with their father. But there were the strangers who took them in and the tender love and enveloping cloak Nasdijj threw around Tso as best he could. There were also the native stories that Nasdijj gathered; and there was Geronimo, whose spirit offered cold comfort—“My children all rode with me,” Geronimo said. Nasdijj asks: “Even the dead ones, they rode with you?” “Even the dead ones”—but comfort is where you can get it. Nasdijj will see the children in his life die, too, and they still ride with him. And Nasdijj is not well and may be joining them soon.

Writing for the purpose of finding a way back into the grotesque swarm of horrors and a way forward to give a whole new breadth to the meaning of survival.