Yellow Medicine Review showcases the works of Indigenous writers and artists, both emerging and renowned. The journal takes its name from the Yellow Medicine River running through southwest Minnesota, a place where all peoples—Indigenous and settler alike—came together to dig for the root of a medicinal plant that grew along the riverbank. It brought healing. Such is the spirit of Yellow Medicine Review. Each issue is guest edited by a different Indigenous writer, and submissions come strictly from an Indigenous perspective. It is a journal created by Indigenous peoples and not a journal about Indigenous peoples, so that authentic and contemporary voices replace harmful stereotypes and misconceptions.

Sapote
by Travis Hedge Coke

Admonish and relish little cobbled quayside
The home pleasant locus of Iroquoian costume

The warrior of social disintegration
still standing as her old people walk abroad, 
may be used to a relaxing politics gist

Inexorably annexed from Zapotecan culture
we see “Spanish-style” grow in-line and have
complicated feelings about what that means,
standing still as the old people walk abroad,
maybe used to a black sapote, red sapote, marmalade sapote

Mami Americana, Mammy in Cuba, Mama from Buenos Aires to Santa Fe 
to Santa Fe to Santa Fe

There are at least three Santa Fe in Colombia
Holy faith wherever you look, in a conquered land 
Where clothes become costumes
Where we are consumed
A reduction

Half the world in five stanzas and marmalade trees.

John the Revelator in a Gas Mask
by Diane Glancy

        from Beaded Mask
        2015
        seed beads, deer hide, ermine, and ribbons on Iraqi gas mask 9 1/2 x 7 1/2 x 6 1/2 in.
        lent by the Tweed Museum
        Naomi Bebo, Ho-Chunk and Menominee
        one of 15 featured works in a 2022 exhibit, “Air,” to protest pollution 
        Utah Museum of Fine Arts
        Salt Lake City, Utah

The gas mask was for the smoke from burning oil fields. He tells her. 
They set their own fields on fire in defiance.
And the sun and the air were darkened by reason of the smoke— 
when day was night, and night was without moon and stars.

She travels through pokeweed for the relic of an old war. 
Her headlight steady.
She drives her needle through small holes in the beads. 
She finds the tunnels she ties with thread.
She remembers the beaver. The badger. The wolf.
The thick lakes and forest of the north woods.
She knows distant fires spread remnants of ash on the road.
She beads the gas mask white as frost on sycamores with sparse floral pattern— 
a vine and leaves.

The State of Indigeneity 2022
by January Rogers

Men don’t like to get forgotten 
Women, expect it
the illusion of noise
is created, it’s easy
to fake it
what makes
a generation
devoid of apathy/compassion 
Children left unchallenged 
unable to focus
without ambition

Big Auntie Energy 
is where I live
this love
is why I write
look at me
in protected stance
arms spread apart like wings
for you, you don’t even know... 
layers of boundaries built
to move in freedom
within them
the lack of distraction
becomes your legacy
not forced responses
to questions so stupid
so putrid
yes stupid

Journey as achievement
blind to the binaries of Sexes 
characteristics still exist, but different 
show me an Uncle
who didn’t evolve
from Knowledge
and Instincts to support
good Women around him
and the Children

bring me into circles
of creative beings
who listen
committed to connections 
at all costs
no sacrififice, no such thing 
but constant Investment

who cares
who, really cares
find us in the middle 
of roads hoisting signs 
high above us 
reading,
Give it ALL back

Damn that thing
that makes activism
fashion
and those who practice it,
popular
perhaps we need to wait
just a while more
for politics to truly
intersect with influence, and influence 
becomes a
pinnacle
of change

Big Cosmic Energies
on the move 
simultaneous urgings 
of keep up, and wait
and if we get forgotten 
in the end, we’ll dust off
our stories
because our voices 
didn’t get the attention 
our egos won’t feel
the sting of insult 
because of it

it means
we’ve moved on
the kids
will be
what they be the state of Indigeneity 
will be, we
are here briefly
as men and women and all others 
are healing
from life to goddamn life
we are here witnessing, participating 
in the fluidity
of our times.

Just outside of Chinatown, the stylist holds my hair in his hands and calls to his assistant. “Help me!”She runs over and sticks her fingers into the dye-free floppy strands.“It’s hard to hold!” he exclaims. “It’s so healthy!” she nods.“It is sooo healthy!” he returns.“We never see hair this healthy,” the assistant speaks into the now-falling tresses I see reflected in…

Reopening In a blue light, the woman is still. She is water recuperating after the kind of storm that again and again unfolds its violence and gives way to the drop of a stone. One morning, she is on the precipice of the small town where she sewed the hem of a too-long skirt: dusted…

Self-Portrait as Twice-Exorcised Child Should’ve known the demon wouldn’t leave so easy. Perched on the dresser it wears shadow, won’t let me see it directly, just claws and fangs, pale tongue like a serpent reaching for the floor. It tries to confuse me. “They said of Agatho that for three years he kept a stone…

You are here because you are supposed to be. Every year.Black hand to brown thigh. Wide jellied curling wand set and ready against you.Noting your age, 23, she says, So, you’ve never had sex before?Push.Hiss-Hurt-Holler.Good, Click-Crack-Crank. Wait until you’re married. Stretch. Stab. Sting.Just breathe, it’ll be over soon, the nurse coos, but if you breathe, you will continue…

What you really need right nowis that hong shao rou recipe.Not the one in the Times your bougie budsMartha Stewarted the shit out ofblowing half their take homes at the Ferry Building.No, the one you need is the one your Ma sharedthat time you fought in New May Wahthat time she showed youthe difference between dark and light soy…

The following piece is the poetry winner of F(r)iction’s Fall 2021 literary contest

splinters her weathered skin,
plums rotting under the sun. Colors

on her skin fissure into roots,
sweetness, dormant in her veins eroding into dirt.

Gabled roofs wrangle her hands as
they become limp, harvested into

withered seeds and chipped in the wind.
Chopsticks and brushstroke fracture, fashioning

into lifelines sprawled like limbs, crooked paths;
the cobblestones fork into diverging omens, slashed

with concrete roads and creases in her palm. The Yangtze River spills into roots, flooding
porcelain bowls, suffocating the plums— sour yet sweet, buried

like proverbs in the dirt.

Self-Portrait as MutantWe fear the fidgeting of GMOs, spider DNA in the corn, crab DNA in the goat milk. One by one our genesare ticking off and on, dazzling broken Christmas lights, deciding: green eyes for this baby, an extra rib for that one.Magic powers, a maybe. Born with mutations you might not see, passing for normal,…

Imagine you have a story to tell. It’s a story about hope, loss, tragedy, and courage. It’s your story. Now imagine trying to write this story having grown up in a country where education was denied to you, where telling your story has been criminalized. And then picture writing it in a second language.The women…

Ashen face in a doorframe and a memory of flame (something unresolved)— Would you know me? Would I know you in your new form? Is this an invention, a number I didn’t call? My cowardice as doppelgänger given form A violent rainstorm leaves the earth upturned —I wanted them back but not like this. It’s always…

Our Honeymoon

was a strand of scenic overlooks. 
I first wrote strange

       —a strange of scenic overlooks—

my mistake, and strange enough 
was everything bathed in the red 
Mars dust of Sedona,
the iron in the rocks aligned 
with iron in our blood,
they say, so it tugs on us.
It tugged. Every night
on Airport Mesa, a crowd gathered 
and the Milky Way made a white mess 
of the sky. Was I the only one
who’d wanted to polish it
black again? Our honeymoon
was a scene of stranded overlooks.
We posed for panoramic
photographs minus the photographs. 
Behind us the canyon was banded 
red, copper, purple

       —millions of years
       of compressed sunsets—

where the river had gnawed 
down to bone, down
to its strange, scenic marrow.

Indiana Boys

The soybean fields flooded and froze over,
and the boys—not yet their father’s sons, not yet

worrying about crop stubble beneath the ice— 
skate, twilight settling in their hair,

until their mother, watching at the window, 
calls them in for supper. When it’s dark

they’ll sit elbow-to-elbow at the worn farm table 
each son will want when she’s gone,

ringing spoons against the sides of bowls,
that silver-on-ceramic note. But now they glide

across the ice, not yet worrying about surfaces 
that barely hold them, and there is nothing

between them and their mother but the clear
syrup of old glass. It moves so slowly, no one sees.

The Parable of the Bear

Beloveds, I keep picturing it
this way: we’re standing, all of us,

between the Bear and every creature 
the Bear calls prey, and half of us

step aside. Half of us aren’t enough
to hold the Bear. It lumbers,

then, in a blur of claws and mange, 
charges through. What did you think

would happen? The Bear would lose 
its appetite? The Bear might be tamed

with a tiny bicycle, a propeller hat,
a gold sphere to balance on its nose?

I don’t need to describe what happens 
next: the smell of blood, the surprise

of white femur. Ones I have called 
beloved, I keep picturing you

this way: sitting off to one side, 
watching the Bear work, waiting to see

if it leaves any meat on the bones.

“…And I should love you the more because I mangled you And because you were no longer beautiful To anyone but me.” – The Love Song of St. Sebastian T.S. Eliot Lining each path, each road stop and roadway we traverse here, wake-robins exhibit folds thick with lashes of redemption. Coarse flint beneath supports our beatific…