Volume VIII, Issue I Strange Wests – Under Fire, Under Water section banner

Wren Tuatha

Where do you rest your horse? Grad School Edition

…There’s a name for it on horses,
when it comes back darker and raised: proud flesh…
—Jane Hirshfield

I need to bleed my orange dome outsiderness.
Then words on paper will mean what they should.
Words about the wound.

It’s a journey
and Bhanu has a head start, her head
always being chartreuse yarn
and the cottony inner sticks
birds use to carpet love nests.
Her workshop will be in the anima,
not this classroom on a former military base.

She pours us out and we seep around campus.
I choose the beach because I’ve been avoiding
its candor. Not knowing a horse, I walk.

The Quimper Peninsula and I
are surrounded by the gossip
of this minute’s wave;
this hour’s sand.
In the ballet, I am today’s grit,
indistinguishable and holy.

Flotsam in a notebook for Bhanu:

grasses leaning and lifting in a Gene Kelly chorus line;
the leapfrogging of parents and children,
parents who were children, sharing wonder
with river otter families;
driftwood that looks like an alligator,
another is like a horse head, leaning ready.
Will there be a starting gun,
or will we all just know?

Jetsam, when will the fire stop following me?

Orange atmosphere—the burning
of nearby towns in the edge
of my perpetual eye. The color
of half thinking of escape, the color
of half thinking, half being grit
watching the surf.

Where will you be safe from what’s coming?

Firefighters on foot turn you around; collect people in the K-Mart parking lot—a giant treeless open with no wood for raining embers to rape. You huddle among cars without regard for painted lines. Panic and time and questions. You trust, chat, wait for instructions and they come: Abandon your cars. You follow the crowd of thirty-odd to the antique store—Needful Things—to shelter in place. You close glass doors. You clench and breathe time like nutritious determination. Every hour made of final moments.

You hold someone’s crying child while firefighters hose down your storefront cave. 30 hours, keeping it from catching. It’s a hose storm within a fire storm. 30. Concrete floor and the heat. No restroom for you and the thirty-odd. Sometimes you catch a first responder’s eye as she shifts feet to keep standing, lifts her heavy hose for dear life; her strained face through plate glass mirroring yours in the orange.

fireweed

We are pieces of clay being fired again.
—Terry Tempest Williams

i live on the back of a sleeping bear,
a slope brown with grasses i can’t name
because i was not a child here

i live on the back of a bear
that slept through wildfire,
choking foxtails and biting stars

i live and moments ripple brown
everything’s dirty, every toxic choice

fireweed we are, moving back in
like spooked mice to the cleared attic
after a death

i die on the back of a bear
with every step—a twitching,
indignant beast, breathing in
future grace, exhaling soot
and desert brine, orthodoxy
of some kind

fireweed, we flower—hang
business signs, queue
for traffic control, tell
evacuation stories
in checkout lines, rant
in forums

crack open and lay our pollen in ash

i live on the back of the sleeping bear,
i spark, i twitch

the bear and the people are one hide,
one death, one birth

while sleeping, twitching,
the bear becomes
nutritious wood.

Wren Tuatha is a queer, disabled poet who earned her MFA at Goddard College. Her first collection is Thistle and Brilliant (FLP). Her poetry has appeared in Silk Road, The Lake, Kaleidoscope, Pirene’s Fountain, Inverted Syntax, Lavender Review, and others. She’s founding editor at Califragile; formerly Artist-in-Residence at Heathcote Center. Wren and partner author/activist C.T. Butler herd rescue goats among the Finger Lakes of New York, where she is director of Ithaca Poetry Center.

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