the practical writer FIRST129 POETS & WRITERS^reservation. Now he was seeing how
they intersected: through masculinity.
He completed his degree and, encour-
aged by his mentors, began sending out
the manuscript to contests. “Joan Kane
paid my entry fees,” he says.
Financially broke, Skeets and his
partner had to move in with Skeets’s
parents until Skeets was promoted from
mentor to instructor at Diné College.
The promotion came with better pay
and faculty housing, but the workload
was five classes
per semester,
mostly composi-
tion. Teaching
was a rewarding
labor for Skeets,
even when he
stumbled.
“I tried in-
troducing the
writing work-
shop,” he recalls.
“A nd it d id n’t
go over very
well. Speaking
up and offering
criticism wasn’t
a Diné value in
the classroom.”
So he turned the
workshop into a
writing class ex-
clusively. “My goal was to keep them
writing and to let them see that Navajo
writers exist.”
Skeets believes that poetry can
offer his students another way of
looking at themselves, one that isn’t
plagued by the social ills that have be-
come closely associated with life on
the reservation, namely alcoholism
and violence. “That’s where my title
comes from,” he adds. “‘Eyes Bottle
Dark’ refers to the mouth hole in a
beer bottle.” Skeets doesn’t shy away
from the stark realities that his com-
munity must confront. It’s all there on
the cover of his own book.
As Skeets explains it, the part of
the reservation he grew up in is like
a checkerboard, the land divided into
sections: Navajo land, which cannot
sell alcohol, adjacent to state land,
which most definitely does sell alcohol
and capitalizes on its proximity and
access to the Indigenous population.
“A f ter my com i ng - out p oem s , I beg a n
to interrogate the presence of alcohol
in my own town. I’d see the men act
out this macho masculinity and only
allow themselves to be vulnerable
after a few drinks,” he says.
Having grown up in the presence
of alcohol, Skeets understands he’s
just a few drinks
away from suf-
fering the same
fate as his uncles
who struggled
with alcoholism.
This is why the
speaker in Eyes
Bottle Dark With
a Mouthful of
Flowers addresses
the uncle as a
version of him-
self. “I’m very
conscious of the
‘dr u nk I ndian’
stereotype,” he
adds, “which is
why I have to
watch myself as I
move into white
spaces that be-
lieve this about us.”
The cover of his book features a
famous photograph taken by Richard
Avedon in 1979. It’s of Benson James,
his mother’s older brother, who was
murdered the following year. “I had
seen that photograph as a child, but it
didn’t resonate with me until I was old
enough to understand its beauty and
power,” he explains. Skeets recognizes
it as a tragic story, but he also under-
stands that Benson James is being pre-
served in a way that many others who
met similar deaths on the reservation
will not. Their humanity will vanish
inside the headlines.
In the beginning Skeets was
reluctant to use the photograph
because he felt it didn’t belong to
him—it belonged to his family, to his