from Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment (audio only)
Click the icon above to listen to this audio poem.
working with willow rods that’s the method,
bring great bundles of them,
put on the ground scatter them
pronounce them, saying:
“here’s one”
“here’s another one”
“here’s one, there…over there…”
willow rods, very consoling we’ll clear the ground
you don’t have to be a Scythian…
and then the ones behaving more like women use a different method
Resistance. Had to resist. Ward off. Deflect. Exorcise. Defy. Apotropaic experiments to shift tone & danger. Apo, away, trepein, to turn. Make the day an amulet. And there were women everywhere across the land, children women, and girl women and they women and fluid women and men who were women and boy women and women from the past on the tongues of mind & ear and images of women everywhere: ancestor women. Out on the streets. And everyone woman that day. I am woman they said. And it had already happened if you stopped to think.
sound de-territorializes
weather
and my love clings to you
sings to you
in the “new weathers”
within a tragedy
of the Anthropocene