Summary

The poem “The Red Blues” lists a series of violent and conflicted images associated with the color red as a way of evoking both the experience of menstruation and a more general experience of the speaker’s relationship with sex and sexuality. The speaker begins with a series of images in the first stanza, evoking the dawn, red birds, and flame. In each successive paragraph she complicates the relationship she has with her own body and the part race plays in that complication. She introduces images of violence, Christian imagery like Saint Sebastian, and colonial imagery like an appearance by General Custer.

“The Gospel of Guy No-Horse” is the story of a man, Guy No-Horse, dancing in a bar with two white women. Guy No-Horse is in a wheelchair, and the white girls he is dancing with are laughing at him. The other Indians...