Karie Liao
place is my hand on the relief cast of Carver’s
the cast is cool
hand vibrates to feel the whole surface at once
memory an indent sense of prints
extent charged
tips through index and middle metacarpals
it was a passing shadow of a bird
at rest, my hand settling on Hathaway’s sculpture
associatory, simple elements
the store of atmosphere, pounds of water
brought as property
to situate within genealogy
giving backs to land an intellectual and art history
idle moments put to gathering
to care, to share food
to not succumb to logics of land/crop/harvest
as required by institutions of slavery or capitalism
the country … wears a rich and luxuriant aspect11Frederick Douglass, “First of August Celebration at Dawn Settlement, Canada West – Public Meeting at Chatham – Visit to the Elgin Settlement at Buxton,” Frederick Douglass’ Paper, August 11, 1854, 2.
In 1854 Fredrick Douglass set out from Rochester, New York, to attend a gathering, to mark the twenty-year anniversary of the “West India Emancipation,” the First of August Celebration at the Dawn Settlement for fugitive slaves—travelling most of the three-hundred-mile journey by rail “except sixteen miles between Chatham and the Settlement referred to”22Ibid. by wagon. Douglass journeyed through the traditional territories of the Haudenosaunee, Mississauga, Attawandaron, Anishinaabe ᐊᓂᔑᓈᐯ, and Myaamia Nations, to arrive in the “historic” county of “Kent.”
About that 1854 journey, Douglass remarks: “In regard to the place, itself, it is one of the most beautiful and desirable localities for agriculture, commerce and education, which we know of in Canada West.”33Ibid. I reflect further on fugitivity of that time, and upon life in the near aftermath of slavery as the dominion of canada formed. The language and logics of the farm stem from structures of settler colonialism, even as they involve emancipatory practices. This has made for complicated dreams.
sufficiently free from the fatigue of this journey44Ibid.
rounding a corner to The Song of a Lark
the light so familiar I had to sit
for many voices, starts
a moth alit, a rhetorical Du Bois
faltering inches of progress the dawning
as the sundial says to the soil
your auntie up the road just now recalls
to drop quietly in what
may be considered
no velvet road55Ibid.
sun slow reaches by wagon over
tracts the soil losing time and time again to corn
history as decomposition
tillage machinery has entangled the surface
aerobic stems with roots in microflora and bacteria
field against nature
the natural anchored in rot
pasturage planting regeneration plots to pick rocks
in tandem with machines
my first job was walking in formation, a child field hand
searching for small rocks frost-heaved to the surface
uncompetitive roots at varied depths of soil nutrients
under restorative cover
leafy tansy resists the eager and unproductive
seedling thugs invasive and exotic
sweet-smelling dandelion, its yellow
a monarch in milkweed
burdock tea keeps meaning to steep
ovum leaves from youthful brambles
clover, mustard, and winter rye flowering tells
sun, the morning hours
soil clung to grasses sweet switch and june
reserves of cultivated squares
the runoff slide of swill the ditches order
placed around holds as farmstead stamps
in a bird’s eyes
willow—acacia of the endless plains
an act of literature—my lion and tiger, my august
morning all hours wound—all hours are the same
Soft purl the streams, the birds renew their
notes,66Phillis Wheatley, “A Hymn to the Evening” (1773), The Collected Works of Phillis Wheatley, ed. John C. Shields, Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers series (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 58.
near-dry creek folds a cabin
collapsed, and cellar-less on the ground
the tempers dim
breathing through the nose, shoulders bare
cooling back
amid a chorus of whirrs, grasses shake
and curl
this sweet and pounceable body
I can feel my place in extraction
hear how to centre / how hard to decentre
discourse that’s found me
determined
arriving, evening stars include Venus
casting shadows on dark firmament
happenings are a place
the where is inevitable material
a practical claim required for associative
rain or shine
all discourse is “placed,”
and the heart has its reasons77Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” in Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, ed. Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990), 222.
close smiles soften together
simple lean in undemand and sturdy
just passed, just buried
burning anew
visiting
fresh and bright as I was dreamed
carver: an excerpt from HARROWINGS, a forthcoming book of poetry (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2022).
Cecily Nicholson is an award-winning author of three books of poetry. She volunteers with community impacted by carcerality and food insecurity. Her readings, talks, and residencies have been hosted by spaces such as New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, Woodland Pattern Book Center, Milwaukee, the Holloway Series in Poetry UC Berkeley, and the Surrey School District.
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