Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
COUNTING BACKWARD TO THE LAND
The high desert is a dog with no sense of time.
From "Nuevo Mexico" by Renny Golden in Blood Desert, Witnesses 1820-1880 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2010).
Counting Backward
Counting backward, common practice at my age, I may stumble upon the ancient turquoise bead I stooped to gather from Chaco's purple sand.
I knew I was acting against legality and moral rightness when I refused to return that bead to its millennial seasons.
Continuing to count, I might remember a conversation pierced by shadow,
that woman who passed us on the trail,
helped when I fell against a rock,
then disappeared when we tried to thank her: ghosts when least expected,
melodies singing in my head for years,
giving me comfort when alone.
I return to the high temperature of steadying hands on mine when the sound of soldier's boots thunders through my head.
Any soldiers. Any boots. Any war.
I clutch to my breast the birth of each child,
holding fast its place in body memory.
Counting, I always find your kiss of prolonged intensity,
lips that thirty years on haven't ceased to caress mine with their gentle fire.
No need to go backward to embrace that kiss.
It is with me as I write,
bathes me in permanence.
Estimated Cost
A pleated ridge of clouds blankets my mountains this morning:
between embrace and ominous, revealing deception normal in these times.
A hopeful young scientist proposes installing a giant fan where it can blow frigid air off the North Pole causing the ice cap to thicken again,
preventing a rise of oceans swallowing small nations and the need of those whose fans are woven of crude palm and ordinary dream.
Five hundred billion is the estimated cost for something that may or may not work, and we all know what estimated means.
We could decide to lower earth's temperature by reducing our consumption of fossil fuel but that would cut into profits
and how then would we pay for the fan? The trouble with poets, they say, is we fail to understand how complex everything is,
busy as we are contemplating a surprise cloud bank and putting two and two together in clear morning light.
Crisscrossing This Generous Nest
The American bison yesterday, like caribou or wildebeest today, Canada geese,
Monarch butterflies, and salmon fighting their way upstream:
all follow seasonal instinct, their need to leave and return etched in the cycle each journey describes.
Whales swim vast miles to feed, mate and give birth, their yearly travels taking them along unraveling coasts welcoming new generations as they circumnavigate naval sonar and other impediments with determination that astounds.
Magnetic perception, lunar orientation,
landmarks, echolocation, scent or solar heat:
patterns of movement handed down from generation to generation attract and repel whole communities crisscrossing this generous nest.
We humans too follow patterns laid down by need. Outcast Europeans defying oceans to begin again in a new place,
southern Blacks moving north in search of work and dignity.
Exploration or displacement depending upon who tells the story.
But male need too often follows a scent of blood: disappearance, exile, war.
The Middle Passage remembers foul vessels stuffed with human cargo.
Today's migrations leave a trail of deflated life vests, abandoned toys,
stories severed before The End.
Man, and it's almost always man, hungers for war, his obsession requiring prized properties and obscene advantage on destruction's giant Monopoly board.
His victims have no choice but to die while animals — our better selves — follow the scent of sweet grass, weather, memory.
Hadron Collider of the Imagination
That towering anvil, weather with the power to launch a flash flood between proud canyon walls dragging branches and bodies in its path.
Spreading up and out on this horizon of peaceful sand and sage against quiet blue sky the giant thunderhead expands.
Within its fierce mystery, shards of ancient pottery modern wrist watches and the desperate prayers of generations race in a Hadron Collider of the imagination.
Letters of a lost alphabet in random disarray a manatee's desire a million sunsets in full bloom and fruits so rare they have yet to be tasted.
Never doubt its swirling mass hides baby birds,
a lone coyote's plaintive song or the somersaulting questions of someone in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The Cup's Handle
Was it burnt fingers, uneasy balance or love of design that led the first man or woman to affix a handle to a drinking cup?
When did bark and animal skins become haute couture,
warmth and comfort cede to this season's fashion,
an industry's grasp on our purse?
The brim of a hat addresses weather or adds a touch of elegance,
math traces the missile's angle or plots soil recovery,
the android heals or kills.
The moment invention claims its course,
continues to travel a river of purpose or veers into a stream destined to run dry on a desert where greed replaces need,
choice tells us who we are.
Or who we will be. Or even if. The switch that diverts the tracks is only mechanical intervention.
It cannot know where each track leads or what will happen there.
The Rains Themselves Make No Excuse
Memory's deft porosity leaves tectonic tremors on a landscape gone to seed —
every swollen arm of green withered before the rains.
The rains themselves make no excuse, easier to thunder through a knot of canyon than mark time in darkening clouds above a shifting horizon.
Repeated enough, the replacement story clings to minds and hearts, erases the sole of that boot imprinted on lunar dust or how I love my daughter.
We live in a time of digital double-down while remembering
— if we are old enough —
the pen's determined journey across paper.
Every Outdated Map
I curl up at the corner of my living room couch,
look out the window, then quickly look away. It is 1780, and Cuzco's plaza is grim with rain. Micaela wails as Tupac's body is pulled apart by horses sent in four directions.
Conquerors from across the sea are confident the history books will tell the story as such stories have always been told:
by judges standing on the sidelines,
owners of all they survey.
I go for a walk in the neighborhood and find myself in Paris 1792. Change is in the air,
that slant of August light and rebel voices fully aware they are organizing a new relationship between justice and law.
I slip behind the wheel of the old Toyota on an ordinary Tuesday afternoon,
head to the market where I buy the most expensive apples because they are the ones that taste like fruit.
It is 2017, milk bottles are thick glass once again and I am a child. Each morning the milkman leaves two on our back stoop just as I momentarily reenter today's life freed from grandfather's invasive fingers and grandmother's predatory gaze.
On Monday I am 16, discovering the deep chasm between desire and propriety,
what society says and what it does.
Middle of the night Wednesday to Thursday I scrape a tabaco kiss from the sole of one bare foot.
The elevator is broken again and José Benito pants as he reaches our apartment,
nine floors up, two mattresses balanced on his head.
He interrupts Doña Leandra telling me of his death in Estelí.
Time spreads like a 19th century lady's fan shielding from sight each mouth that would shout the secrets if it could.
Time opens and closes about itself,
marking past, present, and future on all outdated maps.
Every Fear Receives A Million Hits
We thrill to evidence of ancient ingenuity,
discovery of a prosthetic toe made of wood and leather in Egypt 3,000 years ago.
We search for solace in numbers,
Fibonacci or Chaos,
calendars that once marked our days,
Golden Proportion's dogged harmony.
Some hover in systems prescribed by priests or gurus, easier to follow a leader than account for this sordid air we breathe.
It only feels like the worst time because it is our time.
Holocausts and genocides also trapped our parents in omnivorous teeth.
Headlines scream today's news and every fear receives a million hits.
Time to acknowledge our failures and don a cloth that fits.
Everything We Sing
Everything we sing may be lost. What was and no longer is or never was.
A poem: eternal until someone writes it down.
This is my only time:
I am mortal, yet ignorant of my mortality.
Today when everyone may leave the same mark I search for but do not find my face in mirrors.
I write this silence so that some sound may contradict it and it will discover itself: human and failing.
The World Is Flat
An old friend tries to convince me the world is flat.
It wasn't anything she said —
metaphor making a hissing sound somewhere between memory and that hard edge you touch with fingers cut and bloodied from the wars.
It is the place she inhabits now that colors have changed places at her table.
This is the missing clue: small clouds reflected in the glassy water of a tinaja or water hole shaped by rock. Heat rising off that rock,
diminishing the water in that hole,
rendering it shallower and dryer until there is nothing left but dust swirling around tiny shrimp-like beings curled into stasis until the next rains.
This could only happen upon a flat earth, not round as the scientists would have us believe but stretching from earliest language to the long thin note of an Indian flute on air that moves across the worn ropes of a bridge sagging and ragged over yet another body of water whispering softly to itself. There is always another body of water
somewhere. Caught up in the round planet story —
distant poles and elastic band at its fattened waist —
we have ignored all evidence while keeping the terrible secret to ourselves: a land that moves off as far as an eye can see,
beyond all pain and reason.
The small puffy clouds remain imprinted in dust as they once glistened on water's surface.
The flute's single note refuses to die in our hopeful ears.
We know the rains will come and the tiny shrimp will resume what's left of their sixteen-day cycle. We are only who we are right now, in this instant of clarity.
Easing My Way to Extinction
Industry never tires of easing our journey,
and often succeeds: frigates to horses,
stagecoach, train, plane and finally spacecraft.
Separating and reassembling our molecules still belongs to Star Trek fantasy,
but we stake our future on invention.
The eggbeater relieved wrist action until electric mixers stepped in to render such effort obsolete.
Silent films became talkies, color replaced black and white, radio gave way to television and smaller is better in each new decoder ring.
When I learned to drive, we signaled by hand,
window down, left arm braving cold and rain.
Electric typewriters replaced their manual forebears,
then home computers arrived, delete buttons and printers dealing a blow to White Out,
carbon paper and smudged fingers.
Calculators took the place of slide rules which then gave way to digital sophistication.
Forever light bulbs were advertised as ecologically sound, and recycle bins brought civic pride. We got no-run stockings before asking ourselves: why stockings at all?
But today's advances seem to move to threat of panic.
Just as I've coaxed my computer to indispensability, Apple announces it will no longer support the programs I've worked so hard to master.
Should I retreat to pad and pencil,
relieved not to have to learn another technological improvement,
or simply give up, sit back and marvel at everything planned obsolescence does to ease my way to extinction?
Memory Rounds the Corner
Memory rounds the corner, wild hair streaming behind.
She comes to a sudden stop,
unfamiliar landscape rising on all sides.
Glaciers retreating from the heat of lies.
Street signs in a language she might have heard in childhood but no longer understands.
A harvest of toys with shattered wheels.
Headless dolls.
She decides to return the way she came but finds her path overgrown with weeds,
fragments of words caught in the branches of trees.
Memory tries to scratch the itch that blooms across her skin but there is no relief.
Then a portal of hope beckons her tired flesh and she follows a multitude of laughing ghosts to a place where pain cannot survive.
CHAPTER 2
ART SPEAKS
So I plunge my ear into the hollow of a black horn. listen to it speak.
Not one word sounds as before.
From "Five" by Layli Long Soldier in Whereas (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2017).
Books
I open a book and its world rises to meet me,
black and white like an old photograph or film, where color comes from imagination nurtured in other books and life, places of heart or fear reflected in mirrors within mirrors,
possibilities framed by underbrush and sky.
No head start for me. Other first-graders'
round heads found round holes while I struggled to embrace the code that eluded,
nestled all one summer on Dad's warm lap as he connected symbol to sound:
phonetic love.
By second grade I was ready, ready and tuned in to protagonists who sometimes felt familiar while others remained strangers with privileges although I read and reread their stories.
Places too became people, real as a land I would one day walk.
Banned books, literature a free market can accept and those it can't, a trial where the country of my birth ordered me deported because of what I write: all this would come later,
not only stoking my will to read what I would,
but think and write what I must.
Today, electronic devices dominate the field,
reviews depend on what a press can spend to advertise, the prizes fall from ivory towers into obedient hands, and I still find solace in my corner of the couch, turning paper pages,
sniffing the fading scent of printer's ink.
The Verb To Break
There's that admissible breakage we've learned to call collateral damage.
You can break your metaphorical back,
a child's will (never a metaphor),
sacred trust, even unjust law.
Forgive me, he grovels, I promise it won't happen again.
Applying makeup to broken skin,
his wife rehearses her story,
listens to her husband's plea, avoids his eyes already filled with future threat.
Years after her father's rage, the artist calls her painting Daddy Will Spank,
refers to the child's arm in its sling as negative space.
And yes, it was her arm.
And yes, he broke it.
One says I'm broke and is down a couple million in preferred stock.
For another the same words mean she must choose between rent,
buying food or the epinephrine pen keeping her child alive.
When mass graves emerge across a map of relentless war, bones shear from other bones. Human breakage reveals the landscape we birth from what the verb to break
tells each of us.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Against Atrocity"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Margaret Randall.
Excerpted by permission of Wings Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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