by Odette Nightsky
Atmosphere
The wind tongues the fipple of tree. The manuka lean in to terror.
A gobony of crop fields traces the skyline. Look at us, girls who would be thunder.
Girls with monsoon ringing in our ears, a prescience for flooding.
We were seven and faster than our fathers. We hailed the showerhead like a moon.
We climbed out of second-story windows to trek into a world insensible as stone.
Look at us. The fields shook, the dogs skipped like pebbles into the far.
We held our barrow of tubers to the storm. We sacrificed our brothers,
and the earth spat them back, into the corners of our bunkrooms.
Seven, age of dung and pox. Winter sun split the grasses down the belly,
muscles supplicant to the knifework of a god who couldn’t stare us down.
We murmured cantillations of bird and fox. We bashed through turnips and beets,
until we met something feral. God could not catch us by the ponytail.
The sulphurous morning sun held danger like a promise. We bucked, mulelike,
and held that promise through manila folders and pencils and staples and scars.
We barked at the celestial, and white-knuckled the rim of hope.
Look at us, we said, look at us! But the god came back, bigger,
and we woke up thirty-four, watching ceiling fans
circulate dead air – like gossip, like fallacy. Fiction.
Elizabeth Morton is a New Zealand teller of poems and tall tales. She has two collections of poetry – Wolf (Mākaro Press, 2017) and This is your real name (Otago University Press, 2020). She has an MLitt in creative writing from the University of Glasgow, and is completing an MSc in applied neuroscience at King’s College London. She likes to write about broken things, and things with teeth. www.ekmorton.com.
Odette Nightsky. Shamanic Counsellor, Author, Educator. www.contemporaryshaman.net