(De)colonial Therapy
The cat releases his urine on
your side of the bed
where it neatly
pools in the indention
you nightly rest your head
How am I to infer this male urine?
A stream of (un)consciousness?
Relief(-lease) to my neuroses?
A psychoanalytical sweet caress?
The cat releases his yearning
on my side of the bed
Westernized tentacles of Thought
Colon(-ized) instinctual urges
s(M)other the Matriarch’s head
My dynamic unconscious reaches
to strangle the cat, my past life
extends a hand to stroke fixations,
relief with each sleek touch
The cat (wise old man) releases his Jungian
approach, vicissitudes flood my bed-
lam. The body politic morphs, treaty lines
blackened with cedar charcoal. Your
Urban Indian complex(ations), fix(you)ations thunder and split
lightning
awakens
oppressed
id
cathars(eizing)
soles
limbs
head
Copyright © 2021 by Esther Belin. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on November 25, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets.
“This poem uses psychoanalytical thought to comprehend an Indigenous psyche; the poem is irony. If not every Indigenous person on the planet, then most carry and/or are working on healing from intergenerational/historical trauma. I have been doing my personal work for decades and am at a place where writing and educating folx about the process is no longer re-traumatizing. Enjoy this offering and celebrate with me in the revitalization of Indigenous poetics.”
—Esther Belin
Esther Belin
Esther Belin, a citizen of the Navajo Nation, is the author of two collections of poetry, Of Cartography (University of Arizona Press, 2017) and From the Belly of My Beauty (University of Arizona Press, 1999), winner of the 2000 American Book Award.