Smothered by sun and time / one sun drunk lizard / and me with my belly exposed / pine wood rounds / tree rings naked and orange / sap the taste of resin / cinnamon / you – in my womb – will not have to fight predator seagulls to reach the ocean / will not be born in a pocket of sand / you will arrive in a room lit with flame / greet fire for the first time / taste air / dragonflies crimson-backed and glowing / yellow straw yellow light yellow swallowtail / titanium moth wings / sound of wind ripples dry stalks / whistle / whistle / harding grass taller than me / wild mustard too / in this place a clan of turkeys return nightly / saunter by like shadows / feathers green and rust / black and dappled / gothic / I sit deep in the stomach of summer / creek water still and recluse / moss drapes off oak branches / veined like tributaries / a grey-blue serpentine / cobalt mixed with ash / juniper ash / secret ingredient for blue corn pancakes / turquoise / I think of bonfires / the kind of bonfire your drunk mom / demands / we throw her deceased mother-in-law’s old salmon colored sofa on / 70’s style curved like hip bones / only a few old hippies were annoyed that night / what pollution! they cried / I laughed / hard / yellow oak leaves yellow grass / stubble / a cow sounds out loud as a fog horn / they didn’t know what kind of creature I was / when I skirted the herd this morning / edge of sky against dusty ridge line / we are floating in a gigantic ocean of gaseous / interstellar / enormity / magnetic center point in relation to other spinning orbs / smell of dust and tar weed / midday heat / my baby moves .
Header photograph © Asher.
Sonja Swift investigates the contours of place as land, home, memory and identity. Writing is her artistic medium and also practice of making a mind that is coherent and adept at dealing with complexity. Her work has appeared most recently in Catamaran Literary Reader, Virga Magazine, Kestrel: A Journal of Art & Literature, Alphabet Atlas, a chapbook of prose poems published by Deconstructed Artichoke Press and Tarot of Transformation, published by True Story, a publication of Creative Nonfiction. Together with her husband and son, she calls both San Francisco, California and the Black Hills, South Dakota, home.
I’m intrigued by the “juniper ash / secret ingredient for blue corn pancakes” mentioned here. It’s nice to learn something new when you read. The sensory details about nature are also really lovely.