Tag: nature
-
Wolf
Snow covered the town, and murmurs. Unease, downcast eyes, a rumour you were back in the holding where the song thrush is mute, where a path spills like yarn to the clearing. The fetid black leaf and the bracken. The crackle underfoot. The weird cabin. It gaped from the white like a lunatic’s face….
-
Hamrammr
Úlfhéðnar in my wolf-skin, I am smuggled beneath this fearsome hide. Sneaksome, bristlepad varúlfur, I must stay concealed, keep my woman-ness below the scenting of the men. They would smell my sex and think me weak, think me there for the mating, the taking, the ruling, the putting me in my place. Bottom of…
-
The Time of the White Wolf
It snowed for thirty years and no-one knew when the snow would end. The old people could remember the times before the snow, But none of the young ones had ever seen the sun rise or set or blaze at midday. None of them had traced the patterns made by the stars in the night…
-
Coyote Journal
I was raised by a nanny for most of my life. She was an illegal immigrant from Guatemala that made it to Los Angeles, and then into my family home. She was kind and loving, and knew how to get me to be quiet when it was time for me to sleep. She would say…
-
Running with the Wolves
When I was a kid I wanted to be a wolf. I think it started when I read Jack London: White Fang and Call of the Wild set loose all kinds of fantasies and imaginings in my young mind that developed into a full-blown desire to swap my human skin for a wolfish replacement. Every…
-
Borders
On the Eve we eat menudo. Onion mimics moon from a small bowl, glinted fractals of itself. Cilantro’s diced flesh lingers in the air. Bolilllos wait, steam rising. We all wait. I have inherited this––my life on this schism of wild land, purple montañas littered by desert primrose, a muddy river and barbed wire…
-
Rooting
. . . . . . . . . .Chihuahua Desert Blood slid to soil and our roots splintered wide like needle-edged leaves of agave. We can never escape this desert root, dry to core and apt for bitter survival, snide thirst. A cacti can be barren then, overnight, sprout flame petals, but…
-
How to Make a Map for Ethnic Cleansing
. . . . . . . . . .an elegy Demark colored lines fluid as the Red sea and place names for distance.. . . . . . . . . .Cherokee–– We are a region where herds wait, swallowing grass like fire. . . . . . . . . .Seminole––…
-
Apples & Other Languages
Camilla Nelson’s words bring things to life. ‘Stir this miracle to waking,’ she says, in the first poem in Apples & Other Languages, a signal of the alchemy of ideas to follow. Here, the intangible and the inanimate take on new form: windpipes ‘sound themselves furiously’, a song ‘breaks the ice we stand on’. But…
-
She-Wolf, Kauttua 1963
For three nights the she-wolf skirted the village. Must be desperate, to leave the forest, her cubs must be starving. The men oiled their guns, waxed their skis, took their time, an easy target this one, no hurry. When she howled, her ahh oww, oww, owwww sliced through the still air, sliced right through the…
-
Who’ll Guard the Horse?
for Tim Cope, and his horseback journey from Mongolia to Hungary. Sheered pig fat for the dog, and in his eating, a spirit passing continental drift toward another day revolving. The dog that is protection, the dog that is the anti-crisis. The dog descendent from what is firecracking in temporary fear from…