than any other race. Race is a funny word.

Race implies someone will win,

implies, I have as good a chance of winning as—

Who wins the race that isn’t a race?

Native Americans make up 1.9 percent of all

police killings, higher per capita than any race—

sometimes race means run.

I’m not good at math—can you blame me?

I’ve had an American education.

We are Americans, and we are less than 1 percent

of Americans. We do a better job of dying

by police than we do existing.

When we are dying, who should we call?

The police? Or our senator?

Please, someone, call my mother.

At the National Museum of the American Indian,

68 percent of the collection is from the United States.

I am doing my best to not become a museum

of myself. I am doing my best to breathe in and out.

I am begging: Let me be lonely but not invisible.

But in an American room of one hundred people,

I am Native American—less than one, less than

whole—I am less than myself. Only a fraction

of a body, let’s say, I am only a hand—

and when I slip it beneath the shirt of my lover

I disappear completely.

They Don’t Love You Like I Love You

My mother said this to me

long before Beyoncé lifted the lyrics

from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs,

and what my mother meant by,

Don’t stray, was that she knew

all about it—the way it feels to need

someone to love you, someone

not your kind, someone white,

some one some many who live

because so many of mine

have not, and further, live on top of

those of ours who don’t.

I’ll say, say, say,

I’ll say, say, say,

What is the United States if not a clot

of clouds? If not spilled milk? Or blood?

If not the place we once were

in the millions? America is Maps—

Maps are ghosts: white and

layered with people and places I see through.

My mother has always known best,

knew that I’d been begging for them,

to lay my face against their white

laps, to be held in something more

than the loud light of their projectors,

as they flicker themselves—sepia

or blue—all over my body.

All this time,

I thought my mother said, Wait,

as in, Give them a little more time

to know your worth,

when really, she said, Weight,

meaning heft, preparing me

for the yoke of myself,

the beast of my country’s burdens,

which is less worse than

my country’s plow. Yes,

when my mother said,

They don’t love you like I love you,

she meant,

Natalie, that doesn’t mean

you aren’t good.

Skin-Light

My whole life I have obeyed it—:

its every hunting. I move beneath it

as a jaguar moves, in the dark

liquid blading of shoulder.

The opened-gold field and glide of the hand,

light-fruited and scythe-lit.

I have arrived to this god-made place—:

Teotlachco, the ball court—:

because the light called: lightwards!