Fracture
When the grizzly cubs were caught, collared, and taken away—
relocated they call it—
their mother ran back and forth on the road screaming.
Brutal sound. Torn from her lungs. Her heart,
twisted knot, hot blood rivering
to the twenty-six pounding bones of her feet.
Just weeks before
I watched a bear and her cubs run down a mountain
in the twilight.
So buoyant, they seemed to be tumbling
to the meadow,
to the yarrow root they dug, rocking
to wrest it from the hard ground, fattening for winter.
They were breathing what looked like gladness.
But that other mother . . .
Her massive head raised, desperate to catch their scent.
Each footfall a fracture in the earth’s crust.
Ellen Bass
❤️
2-Sided Map Shows Line Where Falling Bodies Will Land
From where are we getting this information? A woman god?
I don’t think so.
Fem greatness only ever declines on this graph
showing allowable outcomes.
Know-it-all women decline know-it-all men
because know-it-all men know so little it’d fit in a rice pot.
I make my facts and data from internal sources, secret sauces.
I know better. No one knows better one’s own side of things
but knowing how to convince the true authority
on the matter that you are
the true authority on the matter—
well…. Haven’t we all fallen for that, once?
Off-grid, between us, can you imagine knowing yourself
well enough to believe you know others as well?
This Very Dance called Every Rise, Each Fall. The one
you must know and show in order to get anywhere in this society.
In this stinkin’ society where you can’t even say the word
religion (doesn’t matter which) without your back
seizing up out of nowhere. I don’t know if we’re in the middle
of the ending or the beginning of some new concussion.
I have my doubts. I think we might be fucked.
We need some woman-greatness.
Some entity that won’t exist unless we all come together
and wish very hard for her to swim
to our dreamy poolsides. She’d come in summer,
while everyone still wishes very hard to have a fun time.
To relax, melt in the sun, miss work.
Float free in the water, alive-alive, not think about
who got shot, who next, and who is right now
falling from the sky, from one side to the other one side.
Brenda Shaughnessy
❤️
