7.

Indians are not afraid to try sky hooks in real games, even though no Indian has ever made a sky hook, no Indian from a federally recognized tribe, anyway. But still, our shamelessness to attempt sky hooks in warm-ups strikes fear in our opponents, thus giving us a mental edge.

8.

On the court is the one place we will never be hungry—that net is an emptiness we can fill up all day long.

9.

We pretend we are playing every game for a Pendleton blanket, and the MVP gets a Mashantucket Pequot-sized per capita check.

10.

Really, though, all Indians are good at basketball because a basketball has never been just a basketball—it has always been a full moon in this terminal darkness, the one taillight in Jimmy Jack Tall Can’s gray Granada cutting along the back dirt roads on a beer run, the Creator’s heart that Coyote stole from the funeral pyre cursing him to walk alone through every coral dusk. It has always been a fat gourd we sing to, the left breast of a Mojave woman three Budweisers into Saturday night. It will always be a slick, bright bullet we can sling from the 3-point arc with 5 seconds left on a clock in the year 1492, and as it rips down through the net, our enemies will fall to their wounded knees, with torn ACLs.

That Which Cannot Be Stilled

Ash can make you clean,

as alkaline as it is a grief.

My internet research calls it: a disinfectant.

But life is faster research, and unavoidable.

Dirty Indian—a phrase blown like magnetite dust

against the small bones in my ear, many times, and dark.

Sometimes I believed them—I’d look around

my reservation, around our yard, our house—

Dirty, I’d say,

like I was a doctor with a diagnosis,

except I was the condition.

All my life I’ve been working,

to get clean—to be clean is to be good, in America.

To be clean is the grind.

Except my desert is made of sand, my skin

the color of sand. It gets everywhere.

America is the condition—of the blood and of the rivers,

of what we can spill and who we can spill it from.

A dream they call it, what is American.

Back home, we believe in dreams,

heed what happens in fours as lucky.

Four iterations of any thing in a dream—

a shade, an ancestor, a gesture, a cloud.

Four fat quails making a campanile of the mesquite tree.

Four hands shuttling nighthawks along a loom

of electrical wires.

I’ve had a recurring dream my entire life: It is night.

I’m in the dunefield on the edge of the rez,

tending each blue-gold mound smooth,

undisturbed. Each quartzed particle in its place—

but a baby is crying in the green wooden crib,

or someone is fighting someone else,

a quavering radio, a distempered dog.

I sorrow for silence: motion the dunes soft with my hands

and Please, which is no invocation for peace.