2007: GRANDPA
MICA STANDING SOLDIER
My father told me the story of rotten teeth and how to pull them.
My grandma took my father to the grocery store. He was 3, and her belly was swollen with another.
They ironed commodity checks and praised flour for its incredulous ability to rise.
A hand held her wrist when they tried to leave. A store manager’s hand lifted up her blouse. A cool breeze circled her exposed belly, and I think her baby caught a cold.
I thought you were stealing sugar
My father told me the story of dried hearts and where to find them.
After killing Koreans on Pork Chop Hill, my grandpa wore purple hearts and flew home.
Riding the outline on a bus to South Dakota, he thought about dozens of dark dead eyes staring back through the sky. They looked like him.
The bus stopped and he started towards a bar under the sun, hearts pinned to his chest.
No Dogs No Indians allowed
My grandpa died four days after his youngest son, with several purple hearts thrown onto Nebraska soil, native blood shed in Korea, and fears pulling swig and swig.
My grandpa wore dentures and I watched him take them out when my grandma would help him to bed and my father watched his father’s teeth rot after he sewed his mouth closed from a store manager because he had no power and no shells left to fire.
My grandma took my father to the grocery store. He was 3, and her belly was swollen with another.
They ironed commodity checks and praised flour for its incredulous ability to rise.
A hand held her wrist when they tried to leave. A store manager’s hand lifted up her blouse. A cool breeze circled her exposed belly, and I think her baby caught a cold.
I thought you were stealing sugar
My father told me the story of dried hearts and where to find them.
After killing Koreans on Pork Chop Hill, my grandpa wore purple hearts and flew home.
Riding the outline on a bus to South Dakota, he thought about dozens of dark dead eyes staring back through the sky. They looked like him.
The bus stopped and he started towards a bar under the sun, hearts pinned to his chest.
No Dogs No Indians allowed
My grandpa died four days after his youngest son, with several purple hearts thrown onto Nebraska soil, native blood shed in Korea, and fears pulling swig and swig.
My grandpa wore dentures and I watched him take them out when my grandma would help him to bed and my father watched his father’s teeth rot after he sewed his mouth closed from a store manager because he had no power and no shells left to fire.
2015: GRANDMA
MICA STANDING SOLDIER
I would push my grandma in her wheel chair during walks along the river and she hated pity and forgetting her own reflection so beyond measures taken to ensure her survival against the kleptomaniacs on main street at catholic elder care and chocolate ice cream and youtube videos of old man river I still watched a team of blue men carry her to the hospital and I couldn’t remember her age when they asked me how old she was while my grandpa was at a loss for words
unlike the time he asked my grandma to dinner when he immigrated to new york with a six pointed star even though he said she was no audrey hepburn and it was my job
to take care of the moment while my mother sped 400 miles to eventually see her still mother two days later but
it didn’t hurt until I read my grandma some Wallace Stevens because she loved to hear eternal wisdom and hold stuffed animals
and ask me when she would get to go home and her mouth hung open and
unlike the time he asked my grandma to dinner when he immigrated to new york with a six pointed star even though he said she was no audrey hepburn and it was my job
to take care of the moment while my mother sped 400 miles to eventually see her still mother two days later but
it didn’t hurt until I read my grandma some Wallace Stevens because she loved to hear eternal wisdom and hold stuffed animals
and ask me when she would get to go home and her mouth hung open and
2007: UNCLE ARNOLD
MICA STANDING SOLDIER
He walked and his legs dangled from a ribbed body and I was 7 at the time.
“Is that Uncle Arnold?”
“Is he drunk?”
The next day my cousin fell from a tree and hurt her neck.
4 years later my father receives a call from a calloused grandmother with a husband about to die.
“Mike, your brother broke his neck”
“Was he drunk?”
He recovered at Mayo until a brain aneurism trickled through his head.
We moved him to the Bennett County hospital, next to his father dying in a bed across the room.
“Fluid in his lungs is building up”
“Can he breathe?”
I walked into the room and saw the first moment when a body drowns and a soul searches the next world for a better drink.
“Is that Uncle Arnold?”
“Is he drunk?”
The next day my cousin fell from a tree and hurt her neck.
4 years later my father receives a call from a calloused grandmother with a husband about to die.
“Mike, your brother broke his neck”
“Was he drunk?”
He recovered at Mayo until a brain aneurism trickled through his head.
We moved him to the Bennett County hospital, next to his father dying in a bed across the room.
“Fluid in his lungs is building up”
“Can he breathe?”
I walked into the room and saw the first moment when a body drowns and a soul searches the next world for a better drink.
2015: UNCLE TIM
MICA STANDING SOLDIER
I think after my grandma left the store she cried, and her belly hurt.
I think her baby shivered. His blood becoming thick syrup, soaking up her pain.
The world was cold but she still wore that blouse and she gasped for air when his life force stuck itself out like candied jam.
He didn’t care for sweets, but he loved prayer, and his bloodline, and when the sky rested its head on Eagle’s Nest Butte, and after 33 years his soft spine collapsed.
Doctors froze the poison sugar in his back for another 25 years. Enough to numb his cancer, at least until he could see his baby daughter emerge from a solid brick woman.
He didn’t like grocery stores or wincing at his pain, but he smiled at a baby with dark beady eyes born under the sun. I think the world waited to heat until she punched through.
I think her baby shivered. His blood becoming thick syrup, soaking up her pain.
The world was cold but she still wore that blouse and she gasped for air when his life force stuck itself out like candied jam.
He didn’t care for sweets, but he loved prayer, and his bloodline, and when the sky rested its head on Eagle’s Nest Butte, and after 33 years his soft spine collapsed.
Doctors froze the poison sugar in his back for another 25 years. Enough to numb his cancer, at least until he could see his baby daughter emerge from a solid brick woman.
He didn’t like grocery stores or wincing at his pain, but he smiled at a baby with dark beady eyes born under the sun. I think the world waited to heat until she punched through.
2013: GRANDMA
MICA STANDING SOLDIER
Delores Standing Soldier declines a chance to sing in operas as a child. She is on the Pine Ridge Reservation. Her grandma heard the first gun shot at Wounded Knee. Delores is taken to the Holy Rosary Boarding School and lives under catholic eyes and hands and rulers. She carries twelve stories inside her body and will bury two before she goes. She ages in a small house on dead land with a Korean war veteran and their children. Delores is braiding her granddaughter’s hair while two others climb a tree. Her stomach is calloused like dried fruit. Delores is driving herself to the hospital while her heart tries to stop itself underneath an old blouse. She is in a retirement home and she’s sharp and far from another grandma on main street with a fading memory and her favorite children assemble along the walls of her room and she is smiling because the world is bigger than she thought even though she’s never been on an escalator and her granddaughter is holding her ashes on the way up to her burial on top of knotted hills to the cemetery. Mounds upon mounds free themselves of rotting burdens and rich soil sits inside boxes. She is between two children and a husband, beneath sugar and air and limbs stuck in rigor mortis growing out the backs of our family.
MICA STANDING SOLDIER is an Oglala Lakota woman living in Minneapolis, MN. She graduated from the University of Minnesota with a B.A. in English. Her work as appeared in Ivory Tower, RED INK, Solace: Writing, Refuge and LGBTQ Women of Color, Ink in Thirds, The Gambler, Ghost City, and Oakwood Literary Journal.