Poems and Texts

“Mother Church No. 3 (Kin Kletso/Yellow House Chaco Canyon, San Juan County, New Mexico Anasazi Ruins, 1125-1130 AD)” by Robin Coste Lewis

Mother Church No. 3

(Kin Kletso/Yellow House
Chaco Canyon, San Juan County, New Mexico
Anasazi Ruins, 1125-1130 AD)

for Henri, at 2

You step down into the Flat World
Then ask me to say it, to explain

How our name can mean both ancestor
And enemy. Your body begins in four directions.

Here, one calendar takes eighteen years.
I am three. One day is an eyelash.

Your body is a segment of prehistoric road,
A buried stairwell with only the top stair obvious.

We are alluvial, obsidian.
Sometimes the ground swells

With disappointment; sometimes we know our mountains
Will be re-named after foreign saints.

We sing nine hundred year old hymns
That instruct us in how to sit still

For forty-nine years
Through a fifty-year drought.

We climb down through the hole anyway,
And agree to the arrangement.

Robin Coste Lewis

Robin Coste Lewis is a Provost’s Fellow in Poetry and Visual Studies at the University of Southern California. She is also a Cave Canem fellow and a fellow of the Los Angeles Institute of the Humanities.  She received her MFA from NYU in poetry, and an MTS in Sanskrit and comparative religious literature from the Divinity School at Harvard University. A finalist for the International War Poetry Prize, the National Rita Dove Prize, and the Discovery Prize, her work has appeared in various journals and anthologies, including The Massachusetts Review, Callaloo, The Harvard  Gay & Lesbian Review, Transition, VIDA, Phantom Limb, and Lambda, amongst others.  She has taught at Wheaton College, Hunter College, Hampshire College and the NYU Low-Residency MFA in Paris.  Fellowships and awards include the Caldera Foundation, the Ragdale Foundation, the Headlands Center for the Arts, and the Summer Literary Seminars in Kenya.  Her collection Voyage of the Sable Venus is forthcoming from Knopf.  Born in Compton, California, her family is from New Orleans.