Tag: writing
-
Shortening the Candle’s Wick II
Over the wet alders the wind gallops along the road raging, swinging a club. Then tired out in the high pines’ lap like a child after crying still sobs. Wet, the colour of tree trunks, lifting up her skirt’s hem, the old woman quietly goes. Gathered from roadside bilberry shrubs in her billy can the…
-
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…
-
Coyote
All aboard, climb inside! Back of the van! Get back, Loretta! Only 1500 miles to the promised land! Farm jobs, construction, cleaning, meatpacking, don’t bleed when you’re cut or you go right back! Need papers? Housing? A lawyer? A clue? My cousin, he’ll hook you up. Fenrir. We grew up together. Wolf, coyote, closer than…
-
The girl and the half wolf sound
Release the pack into their whorling wolfscream. A lightning-cut electrified cable of a scream, sparking to a panicked dance. Let its coiled metal whips snap out and back in thwarted reach. I am just a jogger in a forest with racing huskies hoarse behind me. I lived to tell this tale and all the…
-
Little Death Waltz
In the heart of hearths there is her, she wolf . . . . . . . .who, linking arms with your first-born, . . . . . . . .who, shedding dresses, crossing breeds with . . . . . . . .leading him on to . . . . . . ….
-
Matriarchs, Monsters and Feral Children
Mary Wollstonecraft. Frankenstein’s monster. The Capitoline Wolf. Mary Shelley. Four names, four figures forming a strange kind of family, if we can call it that. Perhaps better to say, ‘a pack’. Each is linked to other in a lineage of imagination, creation, or birth. There is a shared marginality. Each was believed somehow to have…
-
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…
-
almost like almost
almost like almost . . . . . . . he said in land there is a line around a wolf within is other and awe social grace packed who wills foul and unrest . . . . . . . when the chaste self ills the line extends skin to no where inside…