Excerpt from Letter to the Ancestry Company
I want to know if my great-great- great-grandmother’s grandmother liked the rain. If it reminded her of something longer than blood. If it made her feel like the earth were calling an ancient lover. If thunder made her shiver, but the good kind of shiver, like when a palm leaf brushes your shoulder as you walk in the cold mud. Did the rain clouds remind her of the birth caul of her children, did it seem like the sky was fertile before each feral storm. If lightning looked to her like cracks opening to a new universe, one where rain spoke backward and cried from time to time. Did she name each sort of heavy cloud. Were the huge ones ‘underwood at dusk’, the accompanying wispy gray, ‘baby hair’. Were her favourite the clouds that arrive after the storm, before the set sun, when the whole world drips with rose gold? ‘Cause that’s my favourite. Can you tell me, please? Did I get that from her?
Return of Fire It reminds me of whitewater from within an eddy stuffed up a river’s sleeve – both hands full of styrofoam and roses embracing the paradoxes, years of shell compressed at the bottom of this mad time. I dreamt it while sleeping in a tangle of cottonwood root on an eroded bank near the confluence of universes – I thought the enemies were far away cold in the subway or stuck behind desks and steering wheels. When I woke it was written out on wasp paper with beet juice, the enemy is not a person the enemy is blindness, and lack of imagination. One day there will be forests on Greenland the land will have risen back up fires will speckle the darkness and songs will return again, refuges will be replenished the blues having transformed the distances back to running water, the sun coming up over a hill similar to a goddess moving like a grizzly bear, a dagger laced into her boot.
IMAGE: Stafford’s Deer by Rebecca Clark
Graphite on paper
Stafford’s Deer is based on the poem ‘Traveling through the Dark’ by American poet and pacifist William E. Stafford I felt compelled to dignify the death of this beautiful creature in an imagined, isolated moment. Perhaps the act of drawing her was a form of penance. We are all travelling through the dark.
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Dark Mountain: Issue 16 – REFUGE
The Autumn 2019 issue is a tenth anniversary collection celebrating a decade of uncivilised writing and art
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