MARGO TAMEZ

Margo Tamez, of Lipan Apache, Jumano Apache, and Spanish heritage, was born in Austin, Texas, and grew up in San Antonio.  A teacher and activist, Tamez earned an MFA in creative writing from Arizona State University in 1997.  Her collections of poetry include Alleys and Allies (1992), Naked Wanting (2003), and Raven Eye (2007).  Tamez’s poetry is informed by an awareness of the culture of indigenous people, social inequities, colonization, sexual violence, women’s labor, and the land; her poems refuse to accept romanticized notions of indigenous life.  In a 2007 interview with Lisa Alvarado, she commented that “the spiritual aspect of ‘words,’ of ‘language,’ is deeply rooted in memory, in the body’s memory and story, in connection to pain of the heart and pain of the body at convergence.”

​

​

​

Shoved Under
 

Inside and outside of genuflecting our      faces shoved
under priests’ black or green or purple or red
gowns      our faces bowed forward over the pew.      Whatever

feast day it happens to be.      Intergenerational      church lies

manufactured
to protect      Pope, Holy See, Vatican      global industrial walls

protecting      rapists.

Obscured graveyards,      our bodies’ domination

smeared      in clandestine      sanctioned
Texas      road-side      history.

Genocide’s      tale heroic and neutral.

Written modern history’s‘     heathens’, ‘raiders’, ‘thieves’,

there is no modern ‘American’     without erasure and distortion).

 

Things

non-persons

limbo.

​

Between stars and hell.

​

A place Yamoria     wind maker 

can’t reach.

​

 

 

​