I.
In this case there is a night
a Western autumn frost-sealed
azaleas a meadow thinned
of crickets & flinted by stars
A one room cabin with tarnished
floors yellow walls six
sunken mattresses long outgrown
by children & stacked
in the corner
There is ardor
within the arm of the backhand
as it snaps
outer ridge of eye socket
a knuckle steelshot
through the divot of left temple
There is a spindrift of collapse
one body limp one body
caved in immediate plea
for clemency
II.
At age 9, my grandmother came home to find her mother’s house on fire. The torch-carrying hands came in askance each Sunday for the medicine herbs beneath the kitchen window. White hands, of course-- smelling of lemon balm and camphor. Fragrant hands, soothed, repaired, touched flame to the chattel house. My grandmother and her mother ran through the woods, cleared the creek to land at Uncle Joseph’s.
I’m telling you this so you understand my blood knows something of escape.
III.
It begins umbilically.
The passage may be snarled, feeble
but pulse nevertheless.
It may be slick-walled,
elastic.
It may employ
the tidings of conduits:
birth,
lineage, conjure,
love.
It moves expectorant
through thickened tunnels
of the body.
It crimsons
an open palm
across a tarnished floor.
//
A 2016 Pushcart prize nominee, Lisbeth White is also an alumna of VONA and Callaloo Creative Writing workshops and has received residencies at Blue Mountain Center and the Dickinson House in Belgium. After obtaining her BFA in Creative Writing at University of New Mexico, she hit the Northern California coast to complete her Master’s degree in Expressive Arts Therapy. She’s currently wandering about the woods of the eastern seaboard, offering workshops in decolonizing relationships to nature for women of color and eating chicken-fried tofu.