From the claim I lay to those no longer with me—From the desktop folder to which I drag another .jpg, another .mov—From syllables kept beneath the tongue—From boiled eggs, dry chicken, unsalted greens—From the day I learn an uncle had spoken Dakota—From telling my mother, who replied I never knew—From waking into sudden ringing silence on my thirtieth birthday, in another new home, in another new state—From punctuation to punctuation—From the taste that lingers when the meal is gone—From dandelions I joined into a circle when I was younger—From this uncle, who died with no one to speak to—From his grandmother, buried in Standing Rock—From the .jpg of her headstone, carved with her name, Elisabeth, and the years of her life—From my stomach walls collapsing, night alter night—From the hunger inside me, surging toward a love over whom I no longer held claim—From stamen to root—From the prairies of the Dakota homelands, where Elisabeth lived when she was younger—From settlers who claimed that land for statehood—From the eaves of my new home, where a pair of pigeons perched, encroaching—From the .mov of the two of us I couldn’t bring myself to delete, in which I saw myself smiling—From lo even the briefest joining of earthly things—From dandelion seeds settlers scattered across the continent to recreate home—From the English language and its shifting definitions, its rule of law—From 1862—From Hungry men will help themselves, said a chief, declaring war—from that war, from the exiled survivors—From the smell of an uprooted dandelion, and the stains—From all my mother never knew—From how could she have known, when no- longer-knowing is the State’s project—From a baby, according to a tribal telling, snatched from her mother and dashed to the ground—From official records of few deaths along the march—From these few, each a name their family knew—From the dash, which elides—From the prairies where Elisabeth died, in another new home, in another new state—From the long unknown years of her life—From the dandelion, a slightly bitter green, with waxy milk running through—From stems uprising between us—From the long no longer—
To This I Come
Feature Date
- November 5, 2023
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“To This I Come” from Removal Acts.
Copyright © 2023 by Erin Marie Lynch.
Used with the permission of Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota, www.graywolfpress.org
"Erin Marie Lynch’s debut poetry book, Removal Acts, is a deeply personal, formally inventive investigation into history, ancestry, and loss. . . . Throughout the work, Lynch’s language remains precise, compassionate, inquisitive, and vulnerable."
—Mathangi Subramanian, BOMB Magazine
"Lynch interweaves the stories of two of her ancestors with her own recovery from bulimia to explore the twinned legacies of historical and self erasure. The result is a moving meditation on 'removal' in its many forms that melds together the personal and historical to craft a testament to Indigenous resilience and survival in the face of eradication."
—Eliza Browning, Electric Literature
"Removal Acts is a rich and fraught collection that confronts the legacy of displacement and erasure with searing honesty. Debut author Erin Marie Lynch does not shy away from hard questions, including her right to some of the stories in her collection. . . . Removal Acts combines technical prowess and attention to craft with deliberate experimentation, signaling Lynch as a poet with talent that far surpasses expectations for a debut author."
—Ronnie K. Stephens, The Poetry Question
"By compiling absences, silences, and censures, Lynch exposes the colossal scale of settler violence on the American continent. She wields punctuation marks—brackets, arrows, and spaces—like weapons."
—Janani Ambikapathy, Harriet
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