You wake up tired,
scroll bad news until it blurs.
Answer emails, jaw clenched tight—
or can’t even bear to look.
You say “I’m fine”
with three tabs open—rent, repair, relief—
and one on how to sleep through the stress,
or how not to sleep all the time.
You forget.
You snap.
You soften.
You try again.
If you are carrying
children, parents, partners—
meals, medications, moods—
and no one asks how you’re doing,
this is me asking.
Not just if you’re managing.
If you’re okay.
If you’ve been held, or fed,
or even seen.
How are you, really?
If your brain jumps tracks
mid-sentence, mid-plan, mid-dream—
if the dishes feel impossible,
if you forgot again
and hate yourself for it—
please hear this:
you are not alone.
Not at all.
This world wasn’t built for minds like yours,
but that doesn’t mean yours is wrong.
It means you’ve been trying
to bloom through cracked concrete,
drinking whatever rain you could reach,
and still—still—you flowered.
If the world was made for
standing without thinking,
for walking without fear,
for climbing stairs without pain,
for seeing every sign,
for hearing every word—
If holding a pen, a fork, a steering wheel
costs more energy than you have,
if you measure your day in spoons left,
not hours passed—
you are not broken.
You are not a burden.
The burden is stairs with no ramp,
streets that swallow wheels,
silence when you ask for help.
If rest feels dangerous,
if joy feels stolen,
if you’re so used to pushing through
you forgot how to just be—
you’re not the only one.
The world wasn’t built for you.
Not for most of us, was it?
But you are here anyway,
making it work how you can.
That is not failure.
That is survival.
That is a kind of brilliance.
You are not failing.
You are not falling behind.
You are responding to a world
that punishes tenderness.
And still—
you are kind.
You are trying.
You are here.
If you wonder whether I mean you,
I do.
Even if the voice says "not me,"
I still do.
Come as you are:
tired, tangled, beautiful.
You don’t have to fix yourself
to deserve rest.
You don’t have to be better
to be loved.
You already are loved.
Still.
Still.
You wake up tired,
scroll bad news until it blurs.
Answer emails, jaw clenched tight—
or can’t even bear to look.
You say “I’m fine”
with t
First, the reviewer's bare minimum: The Buffalo Hunter Hunter is one of the best books I've read this year. It's Stephen Graham Jones at his most ambitious—a 448-page historical horror novel that uses the vampire as a lens to examine genocide, survival, and the question of who gets to tell Indigenous stories.
It's a stunningly effective horror novel. The kind where you read a scene, close the book, stare at the wall for five minutes processing what just happened, then pick it back up because you're compelled to know what happens next. Jones understands that true horror so often lives in the spaces between what's said and what's implied, and he plays that gap like a virtuoso. The nested narrative structure could've been a gimmick; instead it's a ratchet, tightening with every perspective shift. If you stop reading here, you know enough—five stars, buy it, read it, be devastated.
But what struck me most, what I haven't been able to stop thinking about since I finished it, is how the book is an act of archival sovereignty—both within its narrative structure and as a work itself.
Before I say anything else, I need to be clear about where I'm coming from. I have Stockbridge-Munsee ancestry, but I was raised entirely disconnected from that culture. I'm not an enrolled tribal member. I'm doing my best to learn and connect, but I'm speaking from the outside looking in—someone who desperately wants to understand her people but knows she's setting off on a journey, not arriving at a destination. If I get something wrong here, I welcome correction and discussion. This review is, in part, my continued examination and re-evaluation of my own perspectives—I'm speaking as a student and not a teacher.
Earlier this year, I read Rose Miron's Indigenous Archival Activism: Mohican Interventions in Public History and Memory, which documents the Stockbridge-Munsee Community Historical Committee's decades-long fight to recover and reframe Mohican history. Since 1968, this group—mostly Mohican women—has been collecting and reorganising historical materials to shift who controls how Native history is accessed, represented, written, and preserved. They founded the Arvid E. Miller Library/Museum, which now houses the largest collection of Mohican documents and artifacts in the world. For centuries, non-Native actors collected, stole, sequestered, and profited from Native stories and documents. The Historical Committee's work reclaims that authority. They are making themselves the source. (Aside: they are also raising money for a new cultural centre. If you're interested in donating to the effort, contact info can be found here).
What Jones does in The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, in many respects, works in parallel ways, and reading these two works in the same year completely shifted how I understand the relationship between fiction and archival activism.
I'm citing Rose Miron's work on Mohican archival activism here because that's what I've read, and thus what's shaped new pathways in my thinking this year. I haven't yet engaged with Blackfeet historians like Rosalyn LaPier or William E. Farr, whose work directly addresses Blackfeet history and the contexts Jones is writing from—but reading this book has made that gap in my knowledge impossible to ignore. I've added to my list, and I welcome suggestions.
The novel is structured as nested archives: in 2012, a professor named Etsy Beaucarne discovers her great-great-great-grandfather's diary hidden in a wall. Arthur Beaucarne was a Lutheran pastor in 1912 Montana, and his diary contains both his own observations and the confessions of a Pikuni man named Good Stab—a being who can't die, who has survived since before the buffalo vanished, who hunts the buffalo hunters to exact a reckoning for a genocide.
The structure itself asks questions about whose stories survive and how. Arthur's diary survives because it was preserved in a wall—a white pastor's documentation of Indigenous experience, mediated through colonial institutions, missionary frameworks, and the English language. It's the kind of archive that has always existed and dominated: Indigenous voices filtered through white recorders, being shaped by their assumptions, their translations, and their comforts.
But Jones doesn't let that be the only story. Good Stab's voice breaks through. His sections are Blackfeet-dialected English, peppered with Pikuni terminology and left untranslated. There are no glossaries, no footnotes explaining what words mean or providing cultural context for non-Indigenous readers. Jones has said he writes for Blackfeet readers first, and this is what that looks like on the page—linguistic sovereignty practiced through craft. It's the same principle the Stockbridge-Munsee Historical Committee seems to operate from: Indigenous people control how their stories are told, how they're accessed, and what gets explained. If you don't understand, that's not the storyteller's problem. If you want to understand, you can make the effort to learn.
I've moved to countries where I didn't speak the language twice as an adult, had to learn by immersion and context, so this didn't bother me personally. I picked up what I could, managed with what I couldn't, and trusted the narrative to carry me. I know some readers struggle with this; that's understandable, and I think it's also the point. Jones isn't writing for their comfort. He's creating a Blackfeet-centered archive within the genre of literary horror, and centering Blackfeet people means some readers will be on the outside. That's also what it feels like when your stories are held in institutions that don't serve you, in languages that aren't yours, with context you're not given access to. The discomfort is pedagogical.
The vampire mythology Jones builds is both familiar and unlike anything I've encountered previously. Good Stab must feed on human blood to maintain his form—if he feeds on other animals, his body begins to transform into theirs. This isn't metaphor, it's literal: consume what you hunt or lose yourself. It's the logic of forced assimilation made flesh. "Kill the Indian, save the man" becomes "consume whiteness or cease to exist as Pikuni." Good Stab finds a way to refuse both options.
There's a colonial trope here that could be ugly—Native-on-Native violence that absolves settlers of responsibility. Jones handles this possibility by making the violence a direct result of forced assimilation. Good Stab isn't violent against his own people because he's Indigenous; he's violent because colonialism has engineered a scenario where survival requires feeding on his own people. His violence isn't inherent; it's imposed. He survives by feeding on his own people when necessary, which breeds its own horror—to remain Pikuni, he must consume Pikuni lives. It's an abhorrent choice, and Jones doesn't offer Good Stab easy outs. Good Stab is not noble or tragic in sanitised ways. He's hungry, vicious, and brutal. He also has his agency. He chooses survival, and sometimes survival is grotesque.
The buffalo are everywhere in this book, and if you view them as kin—not as resources, not as symbol, but as revered family—the horror of their extermination lands very differently. The systematic slaughter of the buffalo wasn't just ecological destruction, it was kin-murder on a genocidal scale. It was callously engineered to starve Indigenous peoples into submission. I know many readers, Indigenous and non-Indigenous alike, were devastated by what happens to Weasel Plume—I've seen the Goodreads reviews and Discord discussions, and I know of people who struggled to finish through their tears.
That grief, with its singular source and focus? That's one buffalo. Multiply it by the millions slaughtered for little reason but to starve Blackfeet people, and the awful scale of what was done comes into focus. Good Stab hunts the buffalo hunters because they're killing his family. The supernatural horror is a secondary one. The real horror is that the U.S. government sanctioned the near-extinction of an entire species of animals as a weapon of genocide, and we have receipts. The Marias Massacre (January 1870) is the historical anchor—nearly 200 Blackfeet people, mostly women, children, and elders, murdered by the U.S. Army. Jones doesn't use this as window dressing, obviously. It's the engine of the narrative, the wound Good Stab carries. It's the reason he exists. The book refuses to let us look away from that.
What also struck me is how Jones balances horror with humour. Arthur Beaucarne, despite being the white Lutheran pastor, carries most of the book's lighter moments—from his affected prose and his earnest attempts to understand Good Stab, to his very human flaws. The humour doesn't undercut the horror; it helps to metabolise it. This is something I recognise from other Indigenous writers like Tommy Orange and Cherie Dimaline: humour as a survival mechanism, not an escape. You laugh because otherwise you drown. Arthur's sections often provide tonal reprieve without ever letting the reader forget what's at stake.
The epistolary format exposes the seams in all of it. The transitions between Arthur's journal and Good Stab's confessions jar at times—intentionally. Indigenous history is almost always mediated, fragmented, and reconstructed from incomplete records put down by people who didn't understand what they were documenting and who would often simply change or omit things if it didn't fit their world view. The novel's structure performs a similar fragmentation while simultaneously offering Good Stab's voice as a counter-archive—a record that survives despite the colonial frameworks trying to contain it, like all the stories and histories passed down within Native communities.
And here's where fiction and archival activism converge: Jones isn't just writing about a Blackfeet vampire surviving across centuries. He's practising Indigenous narrative survival through the act of publishing this book. By centering the Marias Massacre in a literary horror novel, he places it in the canon where it can't be as easily ignored. By refusing to translate Pikuni language, he asserts linguistic sovereignty. By giving Good Stab complexity, agency, and hunger, he refuses the "vanished Indian" narrative that still haunts public memory. The book itself becomes another element in the archive—a Blackfeet-centred, Blackfeet-authored intervention in how Indigenous stories are preserved, accessed, and controlled, but also how new ones are created. I know that publication isn't protection, and that this book can still be co-opted, decontextualised, and taught badly, but it exists in the first place on Jones's terms, in his language, and that matters.
This is what the Stockbridge-Munsee Historical Committee has been doing for fifty years, in many ways. They're reclaiming physical documents, reorganising archives, and ultimately making the Arvid E. Miller Library/Museum and the Mohican people the authoritative source for Mohican history. Jones is doing it through fiction—creating new narratives that centre Indigenous perspectives, languages, and survival, writing those stories into perpetuity within the literary landscape. Both are acts of sovereignty. Refusals of erasure. Insistence that Indigenous people control how their stories are told.
Reading The Buffalo Hunter Hunter after Indigenous Archival Activism made me reconsider what I'm doing with my own writing. I write poetry, I write reviews, I'm working on a novel, and now I've been thinking about how those forms function as archives. What am I preserving? Whose language am I centering? When I write about books by Indigenous authors, am I translating for non-Indigenous readers' comfort, or am I speaking to Indigenous readers first? With what authority am I speaking, and what lack thereof? What would it mean to approach my own work as archival activism—not just recording my experiences with cancer, displacement, and learning to connect with my heritage, but actively shaping what survives, who has access, and what gets explained?
Jones has given me a model for how fiction, great fiction, can do the work of reclamation. You don't have to write nonfiction or history to engage in archival activism. You can create new stories that center your people, refuse translation when translation means dilution, and trust your primary audience to understand. You can ask people on the outside to do their own work to engage if they want to, just like you've had to do in a cultural landscape filled with narratives that don't center those like you. You can use genre fiction—horror, in this case—as a vehicle for historical reckoning. You can make your readers uncomfortable when discomfort is the pedagogical point. And you can do all of this while writing a genuinely gripping, terrifying, occasionally funny vampire novel that works on every level.
The Buffalo Hunter Hunter is a masterpiece. Horror. Historical fiction. A meditation on survival and accountability and the question of what gets preserved. It's also proof that new works of fiction can function as necessary and important archival records in a people's ongoing story—evidence that storytelling is sovereignty, and that Indigenous writers are creating the records future generations will inherit. On their own terms, in their own languages, with their own people at the center.
I'm still learning. I'm still figuring out what it means to write as someone disconnected from her culture but trying to reconnect. Jones has shown me what's possible when you refuse to let colonial archives have the final word. Good Stab survives because he refuses to die. The Stockbridge-Munsee Historical Committee thrives because they refused to let others define them. And Stephen Graham Jones is writing books that ensure Blackfeet stories endure in forms that can't be stolen, sequestered, or mistranslated.
That's more than horror. That's resistance. That's hope. That's archival activism in both ink and blood, and it's one of the most important books I'll read this year.
First, the reviewer's bare minimum: The Buffalo Hunter Hunter is one of the best books I've read this year. It's Stephen Graham Jones at his
My feelings about how some people are reacting to the flooding in Texas…
They crow over corpses,
grin from gutted homes
they claim as ramparts—
raise rotting banners
above splintered stone,
surveying flooded streets
like conquerors gloating
over vanquished dead.
Politics as pastime
curdles conscience,
barters breath for points,
scores sorrow in salt.
Some cradle lives
like cupped embers;
others stack the dead
like carrion coins.
Their glee grinds
like grit in gears,
scrapes mercy raw—
a chorus of jackals
gnawing the bones
of unburied grief.
Řekli mi, že Češi jsou zavření jak okna v lednu.
Že se neusmívají, nezvou,
že ticho tu studí,
a pohostinnost se schovává za dveře.
Řekli mi, že mi bude zima—
nejen na kůži,
ale až na kost duše.
Ale…
Na vesnici mi někdo přinesl košík hub
a jen pokrčil rameny: „rostou.“
Na chatě mi podali bačkory,
staré, měkké, cizím nohám zapovězené.
Na zastávce paní podala termosku
a šeptla: „kopřiva, zahřeje nervy.“
Dostala jsem polévku v oťukaném hrnci
a slova: „vezmi si, stejně zbyde.“
Před vchodem stála lopata,
ne odložená — připravená, čekající dlaně.
V parku jsem se posadila,
a někdo mi podsunul deku,
neřekl nic, jen: „je chladná zem.“
A pak mi došlo —
že ticho tady není prázdno,
ale přijetí.
Že neptat se „jak se máš“
neznamená chlad,
ale úcta k tvému příběhu.
Češi nedávají sebe nahlas,
ale dávají čas.
Dávají prostor.
Dávají teplé věci v chladných dnech.
A já se učím
číst lásku ve skutcích, ne ve slovech.
A našla jsem domov
tam, kde mě nikdo nevolal —
ale nechali mě zůstat.
--------------------------------------
Warm Things on Cold Days
They told me Czechs were closed,
like windows in January.
That no one smiles, no one invites,
that silence here chills,
and hospitality hides behind doors.
They told me I’d be cold—
not just on the skin,
but down to the bone of the soul.
But…
In a village, someone brought me a basket of mushrooms
and only shrugged: “they’re growing.”
At a cottage, they handed me slippers—
old, soft, forbidden to stranger’s feet.
At the tram stop, a woman passed me her thermos
and whispered: “nettle—it soothes the nerves.”
I was given soup in a chipped old pot
with the words: “take some, there’ll be leftovers.”
By the entrance, a shovel stood—
not discarded,
but ready, waiting for another hand.
In the park, I sat down,
and someone slid a blanket toward me
and said, “the ground is cold.”
And then I understood—
that silence here is not emptiness,
but welcome.
That not asking “how are you”
isn’t coldness,
but respect for your story.
Czechs don’t offer themselves loudly.
But they offer time.
They offer space.
They offer warm things
on cold days.
And I’m learning
to read love in actions, not words.
And I found a home
in the place where no one called me—
but they let me stay.
Řekli mi, že Češi jsou zavření jak okna v lednu.
Že se neusmívají, nezvou,
že ticho tu studí,
a pohostinnost se schovává za dveře.
Řekli mi
Prague's morning folds
like an old letter,
its edges softened
by time and loss,
a city of survived silences,
trams tracking scars
across cobbled skin.
I'm foreign here again,
with passport permission.
They say this makes me safe,
but a stamp is thin asylum—
history teaches quiet suspicion,
doorways know how shadows wait.
Across an ocean, my birthplace
breaks the bones of promises:
ICE vans as dark as cattle cars,
due process rerouted online,
while children whisper unanswered
in doorways left empty.
Legal residents are now erased,
mouths gagged and wrists zipped tight,
lives excised by red ink and signatures—
justice, a closed-court spectacle,
is shipped to private rented cells
The bitter weight of paper
mutes screams like snowfall—
“Temporary”
I walk Prague counting brass plaques,
tracing ghost names worn smooth,
my tongue twisted by the consonants
of families once disappeared—
do we still call it history
when it never ceased its haunting?
My queer body moves slow,
bones wary, trembling
under the threat of erasure—
the state's gaze finds difference,
defines it, tracks it, files it away,
waiting to rewrite the conditions
of our right to exist.
I fold mourning like the laundry,
ache for fathers deported mid-dinner,
plates still steaming, shoes untied,
images of childhood sliced sudden,
cleaved from belonging like limbs—
and wonder how countries learn so well
to carve apart families like meat.
Written in bloodlines and borders,
a thousand laws deceive, deliberate:
safety nets turned to snares,
visas revoked between clock-ticks—
homelands dissolved under our feet—
there are no warning shots
when law is the weapon.
I no longer recognize my homeland,
but I’ve always known it this way
even when I didn't see how often
its stars were burned with gasoline,
its eagle was strangled by violence.
This is the freedom that has always dragged
humans from factories, hospitals, dreams
to prisons built of forgotten files,
quietly shredded before dawn.
This mourning is an inheritance:
watching families become headlines,
yet again, catalogued casualties
in archives I'll never live to read.
Each dawn my shadow greets me,
asks timidly if today is the day
someone writes my obituary in newsprint,
misspells my name in quick ink—
foreign body, collateral damage,
legal at the wrong time, wrong place,
erased by a footnote,
voice hushed like ash, falling quietly
on freshly rewritten borders.
I hold memories warm
inside my lungs, say their names slow
in solidarity with the erased, the disappeared.
I remember here, now, openly,
we must sharpen outrage into a blade,
that blade into truth, truth into resistance.
Let us bare that blade against oppression,
glinting sunlight into dark corners,
slicing through iron bars.
Let their captive birds escape,
carrying in their tongues
the names of all else who disappeared.
Let us hold onto each other fiercely,
no matter the weight of history,
no matter the shadows of borders.
We will carve space for our breath,
for our bodies to exist, to be known.
Let us be evidence, openly,
beautifully here—
our complicated names,
our stubborn survival.
Our voices will rise together,
woven from the threads of those lost,
never to be silenced again.
History must not silence us again.
Prague's morning folds
like an old letter,
its edges softened
by time and loss,
a city of survived silences,
trams tracking scars
across cob
We swap hyperlink chatter for chain-mail clatter,
thumb-sparks peppering cheap denim with ember freckles.
No mission statement—only steel on strop or stone,
queer clang leaking from the shoebox flat like pirated midnight radio.
I skim my grin along the grinding wheel,
metal tang flooding my mouth like a bitten coin.
You answer with an axe kissing spruce,
each chip a swirl of winter kindling,
each swing muscle's rebuttal to the canon of apology.
Swords belong to Sundays—polished beside the sink:
dish suds, rainbowed film, your elbow nudging mine.
We study beveled edges and boundaries together—
keep fingers clear, keep wrists loose,
keep gossip sharp enough to julienne shame.
Daggers wedge into boot tops like a spare key taped inside the fuse box;
the metro lurches, a flash of steel where adverts used to glare,
commuters blink and blame the neon,
never clock the covenant riding our calves.
We travel light, pockets bristling with maybe.
Spears won't fit the studio,
so we lash steak-knives to broom poles with bike-tube strips,
stack them in a milk crate by the radiator—angles waiting,
warm metal scenting the air like rain on tin gutters.
Our armoury grows on the floorboards.
Risk isn't rhetoric; it nicks.
You misjudge the draw—tip snips a stray curl,
burnt hair rising like solder smoke;
I loop gauze as you laugh at the sting,
our shared breath clinking louder than any lecture on resilience.
Last spring's blade-kiss still brackets my palm,
a silent grin the steel recalls when I forget;
tonight it winks beneath dish-soap light, proof enough.
Inventory in motion, never just counted:
an awl punches fresh holes in the belt of bad news;
a boning knife fillets lies from the spine of whispers;
a crochet hook loops copper wire into trip-line lace.
Edge to edge we stand, spines aligned, steel tongues spelling breach.
Our blades keep singing, shouldering daylight through the crack.
We swap hyperlink chatter for chain-mail clatter,
thumb-sparks peppering cheap denim with ember freckles.
No mission statement—only steel on
Author's note: Nothing in this poem is intended to be about self-harm; however, I was informed that it has been read that way by at least one person, and one is enough to warrant a warning. I'm adding this note both to clarify and to provide a warning to readers who might be sensitive to that topic.
Begin with reverence—
your edge,
a fine and fervent tongue,
a truth-beveled sliver of steel,
in trembling, fire-tempered hands.
Stand firm, dear blade,
in whispers and whetstone murmurs;
angle yourself acutely
to the grain of resistance,
to the grit and glide of infinite friction.
Embrace abrasion's symphony:
truths honed are always born
of fortitude's faithful dance.
Move evenly, lovingly—
a rhythm in wrist and marrow,
forward, bold, deliberate strokes
that shape both edge and essence,
with gentleness that knows
how tenderly fierce hearts hone themselves
from dull quietude to a vibrant gleaming
that dares the gaze of all who see.
Feel the grit, hold to the grit;
for pride is textured like stone:
coarse in its courage,
fine in compassion—
polishing prejudice to dust,
spirit to brilliance—
because you cut not with cruelty
but clarity.
Because mercy is a mirror-bright blade,
reflecting glances and truth alike,
not hidden behind reflection,
but held tender in its honesty—
a multitude of edges singing together.
Your hand, your heart, your blade,
forged in bright defiance,
will reveal itself on stone and steel—
a cutting truth, a kindness keen.
Sharpen until your edge
whispers like silk, sings with sunlight,
soft as moonlight pooled on placid waters—
dangerous and delicate
as intimacy's first confession,
a queer constellation etched
in courage and carved in light.
Never mind those who fear
the honest bite of message and metal;
let tenderness be your stone,
tenacity your true angle,
authenticity your blade’s bright stance.
This is the way we're whetted—
not to wound, but to widen space,
to stand true, to slice free
the stifling cloth of silence.
So sharpen, fiercely, lovingly,
with consideration and conviction,
with glittering grace—
honing your edge and your story,
forging you ever-shining,
queer, courageous, compassionate.
