Places hold memories or things
I can tell where someone died
Or where they prayed
The memories become shadows
Or sunlight
Mists and wraiths.
Some streams trickle like they are in mourning.
Some twist and splash like a celebration.
The light is dimmed in between some trees, where someone stood in dread.
Other places the sun dapples between trees, beckoning you into bliss.
Places remember things.
They hold echoes.
And we loop again- dissolving together into sensation, and potential, and memory.
I travel from womb to womb, and each time I am reborn I am exhausted with the journey of remembering.
But once you have seen a god, there is no remedy. The journey takes you and there is no way out but forward.
The land thought I would remember more when I came back. But again I had to be reminded. My memory forced open. My mind sharpened against the blade of tragedy.
Each time I step back into the void I think- now I will remember. The taste of purple galaxies will stay on my lips, and my hands will still be burned from climbing the tall nets of nebulae.
But the brain of the newborn is foggy, and the land has to leave out clues for me. Patterns of brightly colored rocks. Thunderclaps so loud it shatters my soul. Whispers heard in a dream.
Until finally, piece by aching piece, it comes back. And all around me are gods holding their breath, waiting for me.
We climb trees to find fruit
We gather nuts fallen abundant on the ground
But the climate changes.
The jungle breaks apart into scrubland. The grass are blown by cool winds. The sun shines higher overhead.
No more trees abundant with fruit.
There are the tart bush berries, the hidden tubers underground, and meat from scavenged carcass.
Food spread across wide corridors. Empty space between. So we are forced out into open savannah.
This is how gods are born. Through faith: “If we keep walking, far and long under this white sun, we will be provided for.”
And we were. Those of us that kept walking found our salvation.
We teach the children these lessons: when the land changes, how do you survive? How do you adapt?
We stand on hind legs. We carry sharp stones long distances. We stare at the stares, and if we find pictures we can mark our way.
The real tragedy is not in a moment:
It is everything that led up to that moment.
It approached with a heat some of us could feel but did not heed.
It grew up our bodies from below until it choked us.
The needle tattooing microscopic lines, again and again, until it became visible
This is the true tragedy: turning away as the gears grind louder.
This is the horror: that when we wake up, we see we are covered in scars that appeared in our sleep.
The years of unrepaired wounds finally surface- and now we can’t ignore it.
All this time- we were swimming in lakes filled with dead fish.
Over and over he has the same dream-
He anticipates it nightly,
Climbing the stairs to his quiet apartment.
He ponders it daily,
While he scoops his ice cream, while he cooks his eggs, while he pours his coffee.
When he lies down in his bed he closes his eyes expectantly and it starts, just like a film.
First there is black. Then there is fog. Then she appears. Floating towards him across an empty ocean. But the water is thick and dark like blackberry jam.
Her back is arched against the surface of the water, and her body is covered in the old skins of past lives, peeling away like an ancient reptile.
For months in the dream she is quiet. Still. Without words. Without life.
He waits for her to do something. To say anything.
Life outside the dream becomes dull. Uninteresting. Distant.
He is obsessed with the dream. With trying to understand it. But the simplicity of it infuriates him.
Finally one night, in the dream her eyes open and flash like fire.
Her head snaps up, as if she has just now become aware of his presence. Her lips part. Her jaw opens. WAKE UP, she says.
And it occurs to him that he has been asleep his whole life.
When he wakes up he is flushed and sweating. He rushes to the window and throws it open, letting the cool air wash over his face .
The men who rape me are not strangers
They live with me in my home
I crawl into bed with them willingly
Because I have chosen them as the ones who will hurt me, when hurt feels inevitable.
Someone will surely do it anyway
I can feel their need, their incessant desire for cruelty
And if I do not acquiesce, it will happen to someone else, or worse.
And if I do, I will be loved for it.
There is always violence in their sex. I must be torn apart for them. Split open in my softest places.
They want to feel me rip. I cannot escape from their desire.
They will make me want it, ask, beg for it even. Beg for my own suffering, and be loved for it.
The impassable contradiction. Love as violence. Love as violation. But if I choose it, if I allow it, if I desire it, it will keep me safe.
Someday, this island will explode
And its ancient knowledge will evaporate into myth
Explorers will look for signs of our origins- evidence of our ending-
How it was that the land was struck in half, and then collapsed back into itself.
But no one will truly know what I saw as I witnessed the ending:
How the light spiked upward, and everything that had been covered was exposed.
The sky opened up, and the stars were pulled through like twine.
For a moment there was no time. Nothing felt significant- but every moment was. Each second was a blue glow in the darkness.
I will find the meaning in it, even if I end by lying on a grave of shells and pebbles.
The sun will wipe away the mist
The rain will wash away the old
Memories of the past will drown in visions of the future
The stones bend down to the river, the ground swells:
Someday, this island will explode.
I am emerging
From every life I lived before
Each one a single stream of sunlight
Poking through a wall of stones
And each beam hitting me sheds away a filmy skin
Falling away from each nerve fiber to reveal clear visions.
I dry out, peel back, flake away where it clings-
I shake it off with shivers.
The chills move through each bone, marrow and muscle
Starting at the tail and working each frozen tissue back to water.
I am squeezed out like a sponge.
I am grated against by shark teeth.
I am pulsated by universal energy into the top of my brain.
I am ready
To reveal
To release
Through my life times I clear the way
And emerge
When she wants to speak to me she makes my head buzz.
I want to surrender to it- I try to open myself.
I tell her: let me see what you have to show me.
But my knees get weak and my hips shake, so I pull away instinctively,
Like I was touched with the white hot embers of electrical fire.
It makes my spine glow- it makes my skin feel thin.
Like there is nothing to stop me from diffusing into a thousand pieces across the universe.
I am afraid if this end- of my mind exploding into infinity if I am taken too far-
I fear the taste of her tongue, as if the touch of her fingers will burst open all of my cells,
And I will be lost in distended limbo forever.
But as long as she wants me to hear her she will find me. I will feel a sudden need for stillness;
And I find myself begging for her, for the sensations she brings me.
And truly she will come whether I am ready or not- all I can do is open- accept the intensity- the agony. She has only given me tastes of her power.
Her hand is pressed against my face and all I can see is light hitting me like a jolt of awakening- from the darkness of infinity into pure existence.
Becoming alive is pain. It is a stripping down. A separation from the whole.
She forces me to stumble. Bends me forward. Lets me stumble.
But this is what I wanted. She only gives me what I asked for- by allowing myself to be born.
This is the thing I have avoided the longest
The healing of my own womb.
The tug of warm membranes tell me
That there was once something ripped away.
In my next life I will be a mother-
But in this one I am not ready. I cannot face the push and pull of another life on my heart.
I cannot face the connection to my own inside body- raw and red, a passageway swollen with deep and painful intimacy.
The tenderness I need to heal this- the gentleness necessary-
it is like shades of pastel. Swirls of pink and amethyst. Shining this light on myself with my own fingertips.
Such delicacy is required to open these tightly clamped tissues. And I am not ready for it.
So in this life, my womb will stay a tragedy.
Skunk Speaks 