Peony blooms fade in the sun
spider was witness to the morning

Who calls into the winter sky loom
nobody questions the chirping beneath

Leafless trees and the way earth allowed
rumbling fire to cascade itself forward—

Our house is nothing more than charred ashes

To the rain that never falls anymore—
Have you forgotten the ones who waited?

Mother doesn’t remind us to gather anything else
wood beams no longer standing, faded blankets,

Beneath leaves, giving way to the long winter ahead.

I ask her what it’s like to be without a mother
What it’s like to forget her ancestral homeland,

What is like to forget your mother tongue—

She doesn’t tell me she misses anything else
But pinches my cheek before we leave—

Her eyes carry sorrow into oceans and rivers
even though she never allows me into such depth

We pack what’s left of our belongings onto the train
station, waiting for our father who never returns home.

Writing Prompts

Land as Collective Memory
Write about a place that reminds you of your ancestors. Let the land describe you through its own textures and shifts.

Inheritance
Describe something you inherited that cannot be held, such as grief, instinct, a ritual, a silence, even if it is someone else’s memory.

What Lies Beneath the Silence
Write into a gap or space of an erased story, a missing ancestor, a break in the lineage. What tries to surface there?

Language as Landscape
What does it mean for language or words to form their own landscape? What are ways this can be done in a poem?

About

Bio

Delaney R. Olmo is a writer who has been a finalist and semifinalist in several contests. She is an enrolled member of the Kashia Band of Pomo Indians. A recipient of the Social Justice Writing Prize, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Green Linden Press, Feminist Formations, Visual Verse, Solstice Literary Journal, and many others.

Author’s Note

Writing in fragments is the way I understand mythmaking, dream weaving, and the world we inherited from our ancestors. For me, time is not linear; it moves in circles and returns to itself, shaping the ways we live and remember. Words and language follow their own rhythms and landscapes, just as the memories we inherit from our ancestors and families. Seasons shift, animals move through their cycles, and images rise again from the land. Everything in this life is connected, including the dreams and memories held by those who came before us.

Before colonial perspectives reshaped the world, many Indigenous peoples lived in close relationship with the land, using it to guide their worldviews, stories, and ways of understanding knowledge. My work lives in the space between time and memory, drawing from both Pomo and Western lenses to understand the collective hauntings, historical erasure, and the ways genocidal acts continue to influence our inheritances and family histories.

When I write, I’m trying to understand what returns to us and what slips away. The poems move between exile and home, between the visible world and the one underneath it. I’m drawn to the moments when the land speaks back, when a fire is on the land, something older than the memories that might belong to those who lived long before I did, and how that shapes the present. This is my way of writing against the flatness and simplifications that colonial narratives often impose. Instead, I let the land teach the form, shaped by the collective memories and experiences of my ancestral line. I write this way to give the land space to remember itself, and to allow its memory to live on through work and words of fragments.

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