I wade in deep waters,
pressing on through shock-chilled cold
blood rising,
starlight shimmers on the murky mix
the rivers’ roll,
shoulders, neck, chin
I tilt my head back and breathe, hair soaked
with what is carried on the current
of the rivers joining.
My feet find purchase on the bank
of their mighty meeting-place
and then I lift them, rising into
confluence flow
Everything is plastic now,
formed like an indelible vacuum-shaped
predetermined thing, a flash of organic matter pressed
from liquid into solid form. expended.
no use left to the earth now
but to decay, in the plastic way;
rendered into shards so small as to rend
the cell-wall of the soul
explosion of the oil age into the far-flung
future
life, stubborn, bloodied, flows over my absent body
hanging on in a thread of water that cuts
between all the narrow ways the land retains
what has been, what will be again
again, I feel
there is something here that electrifies me
when I brush my mind against it
contact with a sense of sorrow older than my comprehension
begging to be known
burned, scarred, scared, whole
what was buried is yet living.
the rivers roll
upon the land
and all the dry
I’ve ever known
is driven out of me.
—
Geddy Cary-Avery is a St. Louis based artist who dreams of the tallgrass prairie growing back between the cracks in the red bricks of the old city. She works in spoken word, printed zine, and the in-between under the moon.
