First Night in Captivity I
The Waiting Room
Stockholm Syndrome Before It Had a Name
The Wilding of Cynthia Ann Parker
First Night in Captivity II
After the Battle of Pease River
Apocryphal Moccasin
Land Grant
Artifice
Why Blue Eyes Cry
I Have Lived My Whole Life in a Dream of Blue Eyes
You are Not Diminished
Note: These poems are inspired by the life of Cynthia Ann Parker and the intersection of my path with hers as I grew up in Texas in area once known as the Comancheria. Parker was kidnapped by Comanches at age nine in 1836. She lived with them for 24 years and married war chief Peta Nocona, with whom she had three children. She and her infant daughter were captured by Texas Rangers in 1860 and returned to her white relatives against her will.
May 19, 1836
somewhere on the Staked Plains, a day’s ride from Fort Parker
She is tossed down after hours tied
to a horse, monotonous gallop lulling her
to sleep now and again, in spite of knots
blistering her skin, in spite of all she has seen.
A sweet gulp of river water poured down her throat
blossoms in her mouth, fills her with such relief
she weeps. Voices vibrate like exotic insects,
but through the guttural caws and chants she hears
her brother somewhere nearby calling out
for Mama and Papa, hears her older cousins scream, no
please god no. At nine, she can’t quite parse the horror
in their voices. She knows only the feel of leather thongs
tightening again so that her legs and arms draw up
until hands and feet touch behind her back.
She is face down in the dirt—
no space between her mouth and the ground
to miss her mother or mourn Papa, his scalped skull
her last memory. Nothing now
but the smell of shit,
the tang of blood, the pounding
hoofbeats in her chest. She cannot dream.
She cannot grieve. She can only breathe.
No doors to lock or unlock. Here,
nothing opens a world that is all
window, meaning no window—no
ledge to hoist myself up and over
and away. No clocks, for there are no walls
to hang them on. I mark time
by smudging the sky with yesterday’s ashes.
In clouds, I find the Black Swallowtail
I pointed out to my baby sister
some morning ago in that lost country.
I am waiting for it to land on my hand,
dotting a line from then to now
as it brushes against skin. Will the wind
follow, carrying Mama’s voice
as she calls me in for supper?
I’ll find footprints just where she left them
in the wet mud beside the creek
and open my throat to the morning
mist as it swirls and settles
in a cold memory I catch
on my tongue, warming it there
even as it melts into the waiting.
Stockholm Syndrome Before It Had a Name
I met you at the blood bath, odd place
for a first date, I admit. I was too young,
but who could resist the way you swept me
off my feet, gagged and bound for safekeeping?
A red haze filmed my eyes, the sky darkened,
tried to pull me under. I mouthed Bible verses,
wondering if more blood would follow—
specifically—my own. But you began chanting
while a sweet cicada chorus sang backup:
buzzing the hum of your fight for me,
the prize of me. And, honestly? All I
recall now is this: as we rode away
that day, they were playing our song.
What’s a girl to do?—cell phone left
on some bench far in the future, no gas
in the black Corvette that hasn’t yet arrived.
I knew Daddy wasn’t coming for me,
either. Not with his skull split wide.
(See above: all that blood.) I’d been thrown down
on the casting couch with no choice but to accept
a starring role in your movie, those first
days rough and unscripted. But then you
retreated like a gentleman, left me
in the tipi with the barren couple
who coddled me with bone marrow
and fur wraps and helped me learn my lines.
The day you came back for me, a string
of ponies trailing you like bridesmaids
prancing down the aisle, I was wowed. My past,
finally, just a black silhouette against
the wall. And if at times, late at night, shapes
sprang to life, shadow puppets acting out
a grim tableau, I had only to think
of my status as your wife and the pleasure
of wielding a knife—exquisite thrill
of ripping into a buffalo, plunging
shoulder deep as I puzzled out the cuts,
separating bone from sinew, hide
from heart—the bloody consolation
flooding me like a warm wet tide.
The Wilding of Cynthia Ann Parker
The shoes were the first to go, stiff
cracked leather boots kicked off
by the river bank. Her calico shirtwaist frayed
and fell away after some months.
She threw the names of all things
behind her back and pulled sound
into her mouth, where she felt
her way through the geography
of loss with her tongue.
In a deerskin shift and moccasins
she smelled of musk, and dirt,
and, finally, of herself:
Naduah, Someone Found.
The night he first took her
into his tipi she was home,
she was gone. She was all
or nothing. She was a wilderness,
a rioting bloom of glory
under his hands
as his fingers traced a new path
in the long, long grass of her hair.
Twenty-four years after first capture, Dec. 19, 1860
Camp Cooper on the Clear Fork of the Brazos
The woodstove’s smoky shadows conjure spirits
on the wall as her buffalo robe is stripped off, lice-ridden
and stinking. She is scrubbed in scalding water
until she no longer recognizes the comforting history
of her own body, and as a borrowed nightdress
slips over her head, the animal skin drifts away
to a museum she will tour in the afterlife. On a sagging
mattress, she searches for the firm foundation
of ground beneath her feet, longs for cricket
rhythms and the availability of stars.
Grief blankets her like a grave mound
as the moon glints on a blade shelved
across the room. She feels her way to it
in the murk, closes her hand around the hilt
like the last time she held her husband’s manhood.
Her hair, hacked, falls in a ragged story
at her feet. Blood runs from the gashes
in her arms as the pain unhinges a door
and she whispers her missing into existence.
Each name rises like a prayer until it collides
with the authority of the ceiling and shatters there,
broken syllables drifting down, mingling with shorn hair.
After the Battle of Pease River
Dec. 19, 1860 entry
from the diary of Jonathan Hamilton Baker
There was great ado, yelling,
whooping, and hollering!
Our boys charged eagerly
to the scene of the action.
There were many packs
strown on the prairie
two or three miles
with a large amount of beef,
buffalo skins, camp accouterments,
meat, leather bags filled
with marrow out of bones and branes
little sacks of soup, sausages,
the gut stuffed with tallow and branes.
We found only four
dead Indians, all [women].
In the evening quiet following
the slaughter, myth sits the captives—
mother and child—down by the fire
alongside men whose adrenaline
rush has ebbed after the surprise
attack, the bloodied corpses now
hidden by dusk. Their appetites
sated with fresh bison steaks
furnished by women they’ve just killed,
they relive the day. And in this lull,
doubt over what they’ve done nags
at some—so that in years of telling
and retelling the Battle
of Pease River, a story emerges
of invented tenderness:
a child’s moccasin spied on the ground,
rising moon glinting on glass beads.
How we adore bright distraction
and the sweetness of the miniature:
the little girl’s smile as the man
gently slips the lost moccasin
on her bare foot, as if she were
a tiny Cinderella
and he, the Prince Charming in this tale.
And it came to pass in the Year of Our Lord 1861
that the Texas Legislature paused in the mighty business
of seceding from the Union to consider the plight of one
Cynthia Ann Parker, lost lamb now found, more precious
than the ninety-nine this prodigal daughter, a tainted stray
through no fault of her own and thus worthy of mercy. Therefore,
they did grant unto her one league of land— 4,228 acres,
seven square miles—as reparation for assumed depredation
at the hands of savages and vermin for 24 long years.
Such was their largesse: to freely give land they had freely taken
as a divine right, claiming the continent from Texas west as far
as prayer and powder kegs stretched. It was nothing to them
—and even less to her. What was a league of land when husband
and sons now lay beyond the bounds of her embrace? What power
had a deed she couldn’t read inked on paper transient as a treaty?
For Naduah, roaming hundreds of miles through the Comancheria
each season—following the buffalo and the breeze
of freedom—the earth was a journey, and she its traveler.
The ground beneath her feet could no more be owned than the blur
of cloud to rain, the sun’s blaze, the fading echo of thunder’s last word.
No beads or baubles or feathered bone combs
in the photograph. A homespun blouse, unbuttoned,
as she nurses the baby. A full, pleated skirt flounced
around her ample hips, scratchy cotton, the cinched waist
of a civilization she shed 24 years ago. Where is the soft
buffalo robe she wore when the Texas Rangers found her,
its supple skin painted with private iconography:
sky maps and jeweled rivers, hunters and hunted.
I long to slip my own adornment into the picture,
lend Cynthia Ann the shimmer of prairie light,
present her an ember of the fire left behind.
My earrings are made of real buffalo nickels:
outer rims left intact, bison shapes precisely laser cut,
one for each ear. But I am ashamed for her to see
how on the back of each coin, the Indian Head
has been sacrificed to bison’s outline, leaving gaping holes
where eyes should be, and the word LIBERTY—
which on the original nickel floats, without irony,
above the warrior’s nose—
has been cut out. It is a criminal offense to de-
face or mutilate a U. S. coin
(U.S. Criminal Code, Title 18, Section 331),
but only if fraudulently altered
or diminished.
Only if you try to disguise it,
pass it off as something
it is clearly not.
Because yours were prized Because I took mine for granted Because bluebonnets always darken to dusk Because blue lures the bee Because honey isn’t as sweet as betrayal Because sapphires shine brightest when stolen from an enemy’s pocket Because mother’s milk is the ice blue of high cirrus clouds Because your mother let you go Because my mother planted dark irises in a row to bring me home Because the color of contraband is a recessive gene Because the Giant Blue Morpho butterfly is so splendid we must look away Because eyespots on wings deter predators Because the opposite is true for blue-eyed girls Because periwinkle is an invasive species Because the blue of your eyes is hearsay evidence Because black and white photos don’t show indigo or cobalt Because steel and gunmetal ricochet danger Because coins placed on the eyes of the dead reflect light Because the deep blue sea at its deepest is black Because black is absence Because black and blue Because you slept in ropes beneath a midnight vault flooded with shine Because I had to make do with sticky glow-in-the-dark stars Because blue is sky and water and heartbreak Because I confused the flickering gas flame with prayer Because all your pleas curled into a shroud of smoke Because we both got burned
I Have Lived My Whole Life in a Dream of Blue Eyes
beginning with a line from Diane Seuss
I have lived my whole life in a painting called Paradise,
a mural of Eden plastered on a Sunday School wall
with Eve as my role model: submissive until she wasn’t.
Rows of gold stars pasted below our names spelled out
perfect girls until we rattled the lock on the church house door.
I have lived my whole life in a dream of blue eyes,
picking up arrowheads in Texas as the Sea of Galilee shimmered
in the distance, a mirage I could never reach. The blond Jesus
in the painting, the one where he’s holding a lamb, had blue eyes,
just like mine. All my Jesuses had blue eyes back then.
I have lived my whole life in a dusty land called the Comancheria,
on acres I believed to be my birthright, certified on crumbling maps
and a deed I’ve never seen. Under our house, Comanche bones
shifted beneath my weight while I slept. The dead don’t open
their eyes. Still, they pierce me—those eyes—so far removed from blue.
Picked in remembrance of you,
this wildflower, now shriveled and dry,
seems somehow lovelier in desiccation,
more its actual self in death:
a sharp articulation of each vein
and whorl—and a curling inward—
the sun no longer relevant.
Color-saturated petals shrunken
to eyelashes are now a concentrated
blue, a multitude of skies,
a tiny universe of midnights.
You are not diminished
but ever expanding—each molecule
rising through the cadence
of time, a gentle nudge of love
bumping against the living.
Janice Northerns is the author of Some Electric Hum (Lamar University Literary Press, 2020), winner of the Byron Caldwell Smith Book Award from the University of Kansas, the Nelson Poetry Book Award, and a WILLA Literary Award Finalist in Poetry. The author grew up on a farm in rural West Texas and holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Texas Tech University, where she received the Robert S. Newton Creative Writing Award. Other honors include a Tennessee Williams Scholarship to the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, a Brush Creek Foundation writing residency, and a Pushcart nomination. She lives in Kansas and is currently working on her second book, a hybrid collection of poetry and essays inspired by the life of Cynthia Ann Parker.
