by Olga Alexander
Firstroots
My hands in the dirt, fingers growing, spreading
tangling among the worms, pillbugs—I plant cicadas
this way, the redwood humming, and birds: not pennies, exactly
or blood, this rainwork. Cool to the ground, running below
the watergreen. Cement turns. What is rain, but dust settling—
the trees in choralhowl, the footpath in soloache: oh, I know
the heat of treewhistles, here at the end of Joy
Street where we brought you, my daughter, at just six weeks: oh, my bones
have been here for generations, in the desert valley, in the mountain shadow—
my freckles, the mottled truth of it: I am filament among the dry dirt,
among the star-sky: oh I am leathered, jerked
for the long trip. This is the point: when the body’s wet is gone, what’s left
is what sustains you. This must be what Christ meant
when he said, here eat of my body. Here, eat of my body: the summergrown girl
of nohome: oh desert, life-giver, mother, lush and fruitful—
My hands, firstroots. My spine a path of stones for the wilder-rabbit, my womb,
my womb, my womb. oh Sher: she remembers other deserts. Here
is your beginning: mudslide rain, windrent storm, she comes, full-hipped,
oh, this vinehouse growing—I’m calling all my granddaughters here, and each
is answering: thistlethistle, pawspark, pebbledew & starbloom. And
—finally, my feet, too, are still.
Take This Body
How to explain to someone who never tracked splits
on an analog clock—50 second intervals, and 25—
that time moves in shapes, circles like gears spinning
over themselves, that you hold no numbers
in your head, calculate no math, just move body
to beats—So too, these ways of loving. You’re waiting
for the one-man, one-god narrative, as you’ve been
promised and told, all but chanting the Our Father under
your breath as you try to catch up with the Walgreens
paperback, high drama and too-good sex folded
into a paper house, and sacrament, sacrament,
holy-kiss. Instead, he remembers to buy the soap
you like, sometimes, and it doesn’t seem worth
the hassle to lay out how you lost all track of the chemicals
of him, took up communing with a menagerie of saints
each as unlikely as the next—somehow slid along
a Kinsey vector, each stop a little less like hoping.
How you gave up believing that romance or miracles
were meant for you, how they were too many
pauses and letters and not full enough of breath—
naming the many ways you split yourself, a bit
on the tongue of each one you touched, none of them
enough to make something holy out of calendars
or agreements. How all you want is to show up
and swim him without thinking, without
explanation or expectation, to move body by body
like gears over each other, in silent intervals
that just might pass for litany or prayer.
Sherre Vernon is an educator, a seeker of a mystical grammar, and a 2019 recipient of the Parent-Writer Fellowship at MVICW. She has two award-winning chapbooks: Green Ink Wings (prose) and The Name is Perilous (poetry). Readers describe Sherre’s work as heartbreaking, richly layered, lyrical and intelligent. To read more of her work visit www.sherrevernon.com/publications
Olga Alexander is a mixed media painter and installation artist. She also miniaturizes her installations into art jewelry called the Nodes Collection. She loves creating artworks in various formats and creatively iterating until new relationships reveal themselves among her art pieces. Olga lives and works in New York City.