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Issue 6
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how I envy ancient Nefertiti’s neck the span
& sprawly stretch of the woman & how I cherish creatures almost extinct in time’s drawn straights put back again from just about gone timber wolf & grizzly & buffalo & bristling gray fox in plenty room & warren against the red cousin of colonial conquest – in shrug & bump of littoral currents casually limning the river’s banks or catastrophic in frozen cavalcade past the pipeline & power plant in endless drift & ebb/ lift & gyre or pent raging in gale & tidal hit – how we kowtowed to uroboros queen-of-the-river Cottonmouth recalling that steamy afternoon wading blindly into the gape of her wide open milk white mouth/ split-tongued – loosed in dead bolt – gliding past us up the shingled bank/ five feet of relentless as all my regrets on private junket/ instinctive as ether- winged Painted Lady Swallowtail sipping Joepye’s ambrosia eons before Schauquethqueat – new baptized Joseph Pye – cured the Christian tribe of typhoid town by a wild root well known to that Mohican sachem & how I covet medusa-head pendants’ pitilessly twisted viperine eyes – conjure a torc/ an armlet ringed & joined double-chained & plaited in cabochon garnets inlaid in turquoise & granulated gold in the gathering/ in convergence of Corra’s sinuous shift from serpent to animal to human – in the breach of precious days & brecciated nights in August sweat & forage – how the callow drive ahead where Eden’s veterans hedge & how the piney lineup checking the open plain – from piddle to drench from shear & punctilious in windward moue shelters me & wolf trees full armed/ coppiced in sun-swallow shine – plowed hollow in pilgrims’ agrarian fever & in post-Armageddon conversation choose their vengeance as girdled & split skeletal hulks unbonded from earth (woods snapped in the axman’s hands splintered to ashy pyres) while slag jam milled I-beams sheathed in sheet steel no thicker than cardboard hold up my house & I – likewise tempered in repeated blows – memorize to the job all shape & function ushering in breathless dark as latent waves threaten to crash over me/ salving as the bellow the hallow of the first woman ever to open her mouth in epiphanic consciousness to sing & Chauvet’s eight-legged bison drawn with burnt sticks in Aurignacian pine oil still thunders across sandstone & how once I too envied hell-for-leather & goddammit go recalling – pausing in the gap – in that animal moment of transcendence – the end of another fractured embrace & how I bent down to tell you I love you Dad & lowering your head to the pillow how you closed your eyes sighed & said we don’t talk like that in this family |
MARA ADAMITZ SCRUPE is a visual artist, filmmaker, and writer. She has authored seven award-winning poetry collections, her work has been published in international literary journals, and she has won or been shortlisted for numerous visual art and literary prizes, fellowships, and awards.
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