Natachee Momaday GrayTEATRO PARAGUAS News:
Natachee Momaday Gray is a Santa Fe poet and artist whose work focuses on the melding of art and myth, ancestry and nostalgia, food and prayer, glamour, frivolity and time.
A believer in the saying “the higher the heel, the closer to God,” she is intent on composing a unique and charming color to paint her world.
She writes: “I will be reading from a new gathering that I am calling Silver Box. It is my composition of collected memories and recent discoveries, a coming of age, a sensual account of meeting, falling, eating, reviving, swelling…a recognition of my own self, and it is about love. Always reminiscent and always dreaming of flowers.”
“This work has manifested in music. Being able to put words to a soundscape melody has always been of great meaning to me. It is a collaboration and an ongoing thread.”
Natachee Momaday Gray, a native of Santa Fe, has many artistic talents as a poet, hand fashioned book-maker, fiction writer, blues singer, and film maker. In her uniquely creative voice, she draws on her Kiowa and Apache heritage to create compelling stories that transcend labels.
Natachee is the daughter of abstract impressionist artist and musician Darren Vigil Gray and documentary film maker Jill Momaday Gray. She is the granddaughter of Pulitzer Prize-winning author N. Scott Momaday.
The reading takes place at 6 p.m., Sunday, August 16, 2019 at Teatro Paraguas, 3205 Calle Marie. Admission is free.
SILVER BOX
I’ve written so fondly of heaven,
So many times.
The egg white,
The ruffle over breast,
How rugged the soil for garlic.
The tin square is an opening to heaven.
Galisteo etching,
Place for worship.
Dry heave, splinter, caress.
Blood in the sheets.
Rinds of bright red melon-
And why are you so far away from me now?
Remember when I sat on your lap
and you struggled to hold my weight?
Not because of my heaviness,
But precisely because of my fluidity and wetness, and because I move so slowly.
Once, I held a tiny glass of dark blackberry port in the archway of a gallery museum next to Jesus.
The last time I saw the gothic bay.
It transformed liquid to blood water, the last time I was by myself in a quiet room.
I feel raw in the small of my back , skinned and fresh.
I’m a baby animal.
Birthed from water,
Rain,
Stem cells,
Maritime trade.
There is a bartering systematic friction within the pulse.
Found teeth,
Found roses.
Strung with corn on the rosary.
