a treaty is under interpretation

so rewrite authority

to mean something not intended.

Congress, Government, Executive Order,

lands outside the boundary:

The face, white, sustained, full, protected.

Language intended the massacre.

Tragedy had surrender,

had victims.

Lands belong to them.

People, it has long been the rule

to not pay them for lands neither

they or their ancestors ever owned.

And rule justifies result.

This informal acknowledgment alone

has the power to set aside less.

An erasure from UTE INDIANS V. UNITED STATES SUPREME COURT, 1947

Alexis Ivy is a 2018 recipient of the Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship in Poetry and the author of Romance with Small-Time Crooks (BlazeVOX [books], 2013), and Taking the Homeless Census (Saturnalia Books, 2020) which won the 2018 Saturnalia Editors Prize. She lives in her hometown, Boston.