Size / / /

I read her bones like oracles

scour random records

newspapers    old books

looking for

fingerprints    her trail

living in time:

light with characters

trying to make a personal link

the children thought she was a witch

any hint of her passions

could tell me    what life is

who else have I to learn from

who else could tell me

how to live

touring the self:

I have no answers

I come here under the barrow

laughing deadly earnest

I ask myself how I am

knowing there is no state in this world

known as happy

why do I insist she must

have been happy

knowing the girl:

the words sing in the brain

we know her by blood

my head full of stories

I've lived thinking

waste not    want not

this is the only life

such a burden    so I'd better live it well

feeding the darkness:

the leaping thing that sputters obscenities

useful wives

glory gone to mud

if those that love you tortured you

how should I then live

if you bullied yourself

if you coasted    insulated

and thoughtless

how

loving the outlaw:

getting used to harm, a pure

and violent hatred of the lies we live by

words do not smuggle cheaply

I live    at the usual speed

dying    not any faster than average

as far as I know    tooth and nails

hanging onto this life

creating it    searching for her

living the hard life:

nearly crazy with sorrow

she wonders who will have her

it is herself she guards

Red rover red rover    I wonder

what I am surrendering to

I call her over

learning the powers:

cruel mother

she knows our face

a home for my imagination

images/remnants/voices

holding them close

There's life in this:

I write her down

out of these fragments    I build her

out of these scraps    I construct myself




Neile Graham's life is full of writing and writers. She is a graduate of Clarion West Writers Workshop and currently serves as their workshop director. Her poetry collections are Seven Robins, Spells for Clear Vision, and Blood Memory, and a spoken word CD, She Says: Poems Selected and New.
Current Issue
25 Mar 2024

Looking back, I see that my initial hope for this episode was that the mud would have a heartbeat and a heart that has teeth and crippling anxiety. Some of that hope has become a reality, but at what cost?
to work under the / moon is to build a formidable tomorrow
Significantly, neither the humans nor the tigers are shown to possess an original or authoritative version of the narrative, and it is only in such collaborative and dialogic encounters that human-animal relations and entanglements can be dis-entangled.
By: Sammy Lê
Art by: Kim Hu
the train ascends a bridge over endless rows of houses made of beams from decommissioned factories, stripped hulls, salvaged engines—
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