Dear BlueBird Flour

If the Navajo people quit making fry bread, we would be dead.*

She sifts her hands through the chemical sand to summon the snowstorm of 1864.
She buries her brown desert hands in the chalk that killed Shidine’é.
She beats the dough of the suffering, marching to Hwéeldi.
She heats the stove of the Calvary loading their shotguns.
She fries her bread to the scream of the uncivilized.

Dear BlueBird Flour,

My grandma will never resist you.
Whenever she enters the kitchen,
a paradise of goodness.
Her most prized possession
White fragments of iconic snow
Below the kitchen sink
A bucket blue and white.

Me and my sister, Shádí
dig deep our caramel hands,
what felt like the endless pit
of grandma’s princely purse.

Where is this delicate BlueBird?
bleached fragments of snow.
Two curious and naughty childhood lips
Are stuffing their mouths full of it.

Exploding cloud
Atomic bomb
Abdominal pain
Excessive thirst

She drags her weary feet into the kitchen
There lie her Kinyaa’áanii kin
Laughing, throwing gunpowder shots

Happiness heals the wounds of habit
But grandma’s finger points at us
We use it here for dah díníilghaazh!

She measures out four cups of dust
A palm of salt and baking powder
Two cups of water warm enough.

It needs to rest inside the bowl
Until the bleached ball maturates
And further splits and replicates
Roll out and flatten it quite well!

And throw it to the frying death
Self-maintaining Manifest Destiny
lip-smacking Indian delight
Suffocate us with your trauma
give us our daily simple carbs

You fly over the land of Shibikéyah
Kitchen sinks and diets damaged
go back to your colonial cage
Seal up our achy addiction

Against your everblue empire
will beauty be restored?

Sincerely,
Your Loyal Caged Ones

*From an interview statement by Trent Tanner, part owner of Blue Bird flour.

Kyle White is a student at Navajo Technical University.