Artist Statement: I’m really curious in this piece how seemingly mundane moments can uncover ancestral memory and opportunities for healing, like connecting with a flower. The fear and distrust that can arise given repeated experiences of persecution, shame, and othered for maintaining practices of culture and lineage, knowing what suffering and oppression and violence can come. Simultaneously, there is a reclamation of magic, grief, and relationship. I also am interested in ways we can hold upheaval together without turning away, victimizing, or ejecting folks from community, especially as we tell truths, and shine a light of accountability and bids for repair through the mirrors and fire we hold in our heart. I’m wanting to reclaim and normalize these fearful experiences, bringing witness, release, and remembrance so we can heal these painful patterns together, coming into relationship with the land, each other, and our future kin (human or otherwise).

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it’s my first spring in north carolina strange birds
sing old songs that sound new to me weeds mingle
with native plants in combinations i’ve never seen
the yard is exploding with yellow
wood sorrel in the tall grass
frenchy the cat lies between my feet she’s at ease
& watching for mice to add to her collection i’m trying to find
the ground but can’t even with my toes digging
into loam i reach down to weave my fingers in a cluster
of the flowering sorrel & shake the delicate stems

pretending myself a gentle wind

frenchy jumps on my lap perceiving the moment I drop
into my body she stretches out until her arm locks
at the elbow paw floating like an impossible edge
we both watch the trio of heart shaped leaves
flutter & delight in intentional touch
her kill drive wakes up by the nearby rustle in the magnolia
& bites a blade of grass shorter & shorter
the oxalis notices an opening in me
of their slender green they say
place me under your tongue & eat me
i smile consider it

but quickly push the voice aside & doubt the unsought nudge
of five-petal-faux-yellow-clover i know this small dose
of oxalic acid acidic like grape skins would be herbal
but my body has been trained to question
my relationship with the land
knowing there are repercussions for indulging pagan wisdom
i monitor myself shaming the desire
for connection because someone might be watching
i’ve become so easy to control a self-carceral being
at home at the helm of the watchtower
my muscles have memory of being shoved in the lake
it was hundreds of years ago everyone I knew surrounding
the shore’s edges so they could push me back in
if I tried to climb out this a punishment
for tearing down the catechized cross posted above my door
white bodies crowd in to witness their neighbors drown
& burn & be torn apart chanting
better them than me or worse the morbid silence
keen cheschire gaze a maw ripping wide toward feast
says something about survival says something about making
theater out of suffering what does it do to our humanity

when we’ve been conditioned to enjoy the persecution
& torture of other bodies like us
never fight back

never fight back

prayer was lost

when old language was cemented away
at the bottom of a well we used to sing & dance around
even now

the echoes have gone silent

our ancestors the ones who came before
had let the fear of annihilation win
because they had been annihilated
in protecting ourselves we’ve let our own
people suffer at the hands of our people’s hands
tear each other down to not be torn down ourselves
playing a game of better than less than
navel gazing pointing fingers
blinding the world
with an unrelentingly ill attended fire

the sorrel’s flower does not question whether it should
grow it simply raises its breakable head near the end of april
despite a lack of hope & reassurance
there is no hesitation no should I
or what is the right thing to do
no I’m just one being so how could I even make a difference
or it’s all going to end anyway
the petals are still made
the flower still blooms the sorrel is clear
on their responsibility knows what they’re supposed to do
with the energy & skill they’re given disciplined
in their green body held by the original mother
sprouting for the pollinators & trusting this whole time
we’d remember our place & histories
that we might devote ourselves to metabolize
the grief & rage of what was lost repair a legacy
this damage we brought in with us
there are those who believe we’ve trial & errored our way through
to learn what holds poison & what doesn’t
dying & dying from eating the wrong mushrooms
until our caveman brains got it right

but that has never been the case wisdom diminished in the loss
of trust & memory

i promise to remember the ones
who’ve already known who’ve always known
that all we’ve had to do is listen
do you hear it? so many creatures
are speaking
right now

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