Our next reader.
Our next poet is Selene Hofstetter.
She is a tribal member of the Confederated
Tribes of Warm Springs.
Having spent most of her life in Southern California,
she now writes in Colorado.
Let's give it up for Selene.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.
I will be reading three poems tonight.
A cedar bundle burning is to be standing
in the middle of a forest on fire.
But for Californians, this is another summer bonfire
happening in the sky.
It won't burn the whole state.
Just the inside.
Like the inside of a pueblo pot placed underneath a clay
fragment with wood logs piled on top.
The cedar, àxmi, clay is and will burn.
But if you run past the ice plant over the wet sand
and float in atàchuush and look up,
you can imagine that it's a cloudy day
with the odd aftertaste of monterey cypress.
When burning cedar, I burn the edges.
Otherwise, I will be smudging with a second sun.
When I make pots, I work from the inside out.
Morphing the malleability of clay
into a prebaked stone whose heat seeps into my hands
and reminds me of the fire it just left.
Stone meets stone as my hands work across àxmi and sky
to burnish--
háashsha energy in clay.
I h háashhaashsha into the cedar flame
and I'm reminded of my káɬa, mother, sister
whose spirits are a raging fire consuming San Diego's
dry valleys.
They are women who can walk into atàchuush and burn it away.
[CHEERING]