In an Angry Season

A white woman navigates her fear and uncertainty to learn the ways of the people she called savages, until she begins to dream "in Dakota, syllables sliding / on my tongue like tender pieces of meat." An African man, on display as a cannibal at the World's Columbian Exposition in 1893, sees into the future: "humiliations heaped up / as on overfilled plates ... / ... a country that casually / consumes its own." A woman holds the gray-blue barrel of a gun in her mouth, "the taste familiar / as her own blood."