One of Harjo's early triumphs, "The Woman Hanging from the Thirteenth Floor Window" (1983) describes conflict in the tense drama of an unnamed woman who hangs between survival and doom. Subtle touches characterize her personal torment as "her mother's daughter and her father's son." Crucial to the woman is motherhood and the impetus to lie still and cuddle a sleeping infant rather than "to get up, to get up, to get up" at the command of a harassing male, generalized as "gigantic men."
Harjo's coverage of impending suicide stresses "lonelinesses." In line 46, in view of pitiless women and others who clutch their babes like bouquets while offering aid, the speaker establishes that suffering and choice are an individual matter. From chewing at harsh truths, the hanging woman's teeth are chipped. The precarious either/or of her posture remains unresolved in the last four lines, suggesting that death in life mirrors the fatal leap.
A contemporary grudge piece, "New Orleans," explores the poet's trove of history-as-memory during a trek down the Mississippi to New Orleans. The speaker-traveler — obviously Harjo herself — carries preconceptions of an undercurrent of blood, of "voices buried in the Mississippi / mud." The native perspective emerges with wry humor: The poet-speaker envisions a trinket seller destroyed by magic red rocks that repay the unwary for wrongs that date to the European settlement of the New World. A deft shape-shift depicts the speaker, searching for a familiar Indian face, as a swimmer submerged in gore, "a delta in the skin."
