Episode 101: Emerald GoingSnake, Someday I'll Love--

This episode opens "Someday I'll Love" poems through the vivid imagery of a young poet's connection with their grandmother, remembering in love as memory begins to slip. Emerald ᏃᏈᏏ GoingSnake is an Indigenous poet from the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians and the Muscogee (Creek) Nation in Oklahoma. Winner of the 2024 Maureen Egen Writers Exchange Award for poetry and the recipient of the 2023 Indigenous Nations Poets fellowship, they live in St. Louis. Portrait by Erin Lewis Photography The poem was featured on Poem-a-Day and can be found at the Academy of American Poets. See here for the poem online. Someday I’ll Love— Emerald ᏃᏈᏏ GoingSnake —after Frank O’Hara like I dreamt of the lamb—slaughtered, forgotten, lying on porcelain tile, on crimson-filled grout— and woke up thinking of my grandmother, of her Betty Boop hands that held marbled stone, held dough-balled flour, held the first strands of my hair floating atop the river— like winter apples, the ones that hang outside my living room window and survive first snowfall to feed the neighborhood crows, how they fall beneath my boots, staining my rubber soles with epigraphs of rot, epigraphs of fors, of dears, of holding on till frost’s end. Someday I will see long-forgotten fingerprints on the inside of my eyelids as I go to sleep, as I close my eyes for silence on a Wednesday, mourning—seeking—creases and smile lines, porch lights and swing sets, summer nights of lightning bugs and Johnny Cash. I think it will be a Tuesday, or maybe someday is yesterday, is two months from now, is going to be a day when I forget what I’m supposed to be remembering. For now, I will paint my nails cradle, adorn my skin in cloth that doesn’t choke, tell my bones that they are each a lamb remembered. Copyright © 2024 by Emerald ᏃᏈᏏ GoingSnake. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on November 7, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets. Used by permission.