The birds stay every winter and the two of them feed them potato skins now. After her parents had died she married what seemed like the nicest guy in the nearest village, and he came back to her little farm; barley and potatoes on about an acre. He was an adequate farmer and in due course they had a boy that they named Tuptan.

In the evening he would turn on the radio to local music and sing to it. He sang right back into the speaker and demanded total quiet as he did so. He was seized by the fantasy that someday he would go to the capitol and become a star. Not that this was likely, never-the-less she worried; what would she do if he left?

One evening when he was three Tuptan began screaming at his father as he sang into the radio. Who ever knows for sure what sets a three-year-old to screaming, but dad lost it, grabbed Tuptan by neck and kept banging his head against the floor. As he was hunched over her child she thrust the kitchen knife all the way in from the side, below the ribs and watched him die. The birds soon found the body and picked the bones clean.

There were some hard years, but Tuptan is now eight and able to do the plowing behind a dzo borrowed from the neighbor 2 miles up the trail.

Crows mark the border
Between despair
And joy
They are
Poets of noise. Joy Harjo

George's selection of 66 Phlogs is available in print from People's Press.

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