Your Girlfriend as Manifest Destiny
Cathy Ulrich
She will be sea to shining sea, she will be trappers, explorers, settlers and their covered wagons, soldiers and their gunfire roar, this land is our land, she will be Washito, Tippecanoe, Wounded Knee, long-walk Trail of Tears, she will be discarded languages, stolen words, brown-eyed children in stiff white men’s schools, curl of smoke from brick chimneys, blanket-white of winter, the bison, the deer, fox and stoat, osprey in its nest, and when she speaks your name, it is with the voice of a million ghosts, and her mouth holds the quiet and promise of their lost, dark grave.
Cathy Ulrich is Chippewa-Cree and black on her birth mother's side. Her work has been published in various journals, including Adroit, Vast Chasm and Reservoir Road.
