Category: Reckoning X

Recollection

During my grandmother’s prayers, I would watch

the cracked earth just outside her windowpane, the dust lifting

 

like sermons lost in the dry air. My favorite story

was of the river that once carved through the valley,

 

its body endless, spilling into the fields. Less famous

is how the Big Pharm diverted it, how the heat pressed

 

its lips against . . .

The Power of the Land

1.

I remember the soil first. When I reached in and filled a farm trowel with it, damp, red, breathing under the greenery, it clung to my fingers like memory. It felt like something alive. It was alive, duh. But I mean something different. The soil felt like it was intelligent. Like it knew what was going on. Like it knew what was about to happen, the evil that was about . . .

To Stand, You Must be Rooted

“What should we bring Pawpaw for dinner?” I asked Mama.

Her bronze urn rested in the passenger’s seat, secured by the seat belt. Her ghost sat in the backseat, wearing the green skirt suit I’d buried her in, a thin blue aura haloing her body.

We were driving from Birmingham to Pawpaw’s farm in Sweetcreek. The high-rises and billboards gradually surrendered to . . .

Point Wolf

WOLF POINT4

The Lewis and Clark Expedition passed by here, westward bound, in May 1805. Fur trappers and traders followed them a few years later. Steamboats began making it from St. Louis up the Missouri as far as Fort Benton in the early 1860s. Wolf Point was the halfway point between Bismarck and Fort Benton. Wood choppers supplied cord wood for boats stopping . . .

The Hot Spring Post-Pinkerton

PINKERTON HOT SPRINGS5

Even though this land was Ute territory, the upper Animas River Valley was first settled by prospectors in the spring of 1860. Charles Baker, returning from the mines north of Silverton, established “Old Animas City” and built the first bridge across the Animas River. The community lasted less than a year before it was abandoned. During . . .

Resurrecting a River

I never knew a river could be in a state of apparent death. I learned about it recently when I read that the Atoyac was declared clinically dead, and for the past 30 years, efforts had been made to rehabilitate it to no avail.

Don’t ask why, but I imagine the river as a person being wheeled into a hospital on a stretcher, paramedics shouting at the emergency room doctors: . . .

Resucitar un río

No sabía que un río podía declararse clínicamente muerto. Me enteré hace poco, cuando leí que el Atoyac lo estaba y que, desde hacía 30 años, se intentaba rehabilitar. Sin éxito.

No pregunten por qué, pero imagino al río como una persona entrando en camilla a un hospital y los paramédicos gritando a los urgenciólogos: ¡Emergencia Uno! Pero lo cierto es que no es . . .

Once, I returned Tulip, Once I became

once the city sprouted with gods—

seeds whispers, freshly braided with the breaths of the

ancients; tombs cracked impulses like

husks and roots curled from the bones of history. say

once, children built homes in the ribs of

cedars. their colours of laughter carved into a country

bark. once, elders named their dreams

after a tree. for trees do not forget the orders . . .