Christien Gholson
Christien Gholson is the author of several books of poetry, including The No One Poems (Thirty West Publishing), All the Beautiful Dead (Bitter Oleander Press), and On the Side of the Crow (Hanging Loose Press; re-issued by Parthian Books in the UK); and a novel, A Fish Trapped Inside the Wind (Parthian Books). Christien lives in Oregon, working as a counselor at a anarchist-oriented collective clinic.
I open the small charred
1. Rain all night. Mist dissolves the mountains. I open the small, charred metal box you sent,
burnt 40 years ago in the house fire, and smell that smell, so familiar, one that’s always with me,
the smell of all-things-burning-at-once, mix of meat executed at the stake and toxic paint-shrieks
in a vat of melted plastic, that still clings to things
inside the box – pieces of a lost life, one I tried to
erase from memory, because I could not contain
the loneliness we all shared inside that house.
2. The mountains emerge from nothing, as if they were never gone. We never did recover from that
fire, did we? No one ever said it was something
we needed to recover from. It happens all the
time.
Move on. Your life is ahead of you. What does recover even mean? A return to a previous state.
I never wanted to make that return. The smell clings to an old cartoon a child made to make
someone laugh. Anyone. Smoke-residue was on that child’s fingers long before the fire…
3. Outside, the oak is fire; amber, brick and blood red. The brown along each leaf-edge is a glorious life-shout inside a masque for death, while the world all around this town will not recover from last year’s fires, or next year’s fires (slowly closing in). I take in a deep breath of that distant burning, close the lid, knowing where I can find it anytime, inside this small charred box, that I’ve given the impossible task of holding everything that cannot be contained.
3. Outside, the oak is fire; amber, brick and blood red. The brown along each leaf-edge is a glorious life-shout inside a masque for death, while the world all around this town will not recover from last year’s fires, or next year’s fires (slowly closing in). I take in a deep breath of that distant burning, close the lid, knowing where I can find it anytime, inside this small charred box, that I’ve given the impossible task of holding everything that cannot be contained.
Refugee
Our findings suggest that warming-induced body size reduction is a general response to climate change, and reveal a similarly consistent and unexpected shift in body shape. We hypothesise that increasing wing length represents a compensatory adaptation to maintain migration as reductions in body size have increased the metabolic cost of flight. Ecology Letters 2020
Circles pass through each other on the pond’s surface, envelop a child’s cry.
Turkey vultures enter the sun, exit through its burning back door, into the noise of a nearby highway.
How do they contain Death’s anger, Death’s melancholy, Death’s desperate desire to merge?
When will vulture bodies get too small to shelter all of Death’s needs, that haunted longing?
Refugee, it will roam from one body to another – blue gills, tarsiers, dragonflies, human bodies – testing…
Can I sustain that cold kiss to the heart, the eye? Circles intersect, envelop my cold silence.
Vulture wings glide over water, luxurious, hold up the sun’s light, lend shade to the dying and the dead.
Protozoa, a cave painter, a moth’s tongue: how the world was made
Parasites inside me created and were created by the moon and now my eyes follow the moon through bare branches.
Protozoa turn my head slowly, so slowly, as if my head was trying to mimic their ancient blind turning, following
the movements of the moon when the moon walked among them, spoke with them, performed miracles. They’ve explained
to us, over and over, how the shadows at the edge of the sea are our ancestors, how shadows across stone fields are our
ancestors, how shadows deep in the gut are ancestors. When I finally listened to them, I found myself at the window, studying
orange trumpet flowers where white sphinx moths unfurled their tongues (Yet another séance held to draw down the moon.
And I was invited to that séance. And you were invited, too. Insomniacs, we watched a woman pull horses from rock,
whispering the thousand names of the moon, her torch flame leaping and retreating, imitating the moth’s tongue). And I
remembered rocking back and forth, sucking on my own tongue, a sleepless infant, unaware of the moth’s work, flame’s
tides, but named it for the first time: Luna. I looked up, saw a woman’s face behind glass in the highest window of the old folk’s
home next door. What was she looking at? Horses in moonlight, bounding across the roofs, putting out the streetlights one by one,
returning us to the turning dark of our intestines, stomachs, liver, lungs, heart…
Car Batteries, Falling Snow, Snakestones
1. Snow flies in from the south in waves; thick with huge flakes, then
sparse, with flakes so small they float, can’t make it to earth. Cars
slice through grey snow on Coburg Road, most heading to work. I
can’t. Someone stole my car battery last night. No damage, though.
Were they purposefully careful? But why bother? Maybe this is
the new way we look out for each other…
2. I weave my hands in an ascending spiral through falling flakes, long
for a world where, when the snow falls, everything we call ‘normal
life’ stops, leaves us still, watching the flakes fall, eyes empty as an
echo off a cave wall, hands resolute as a hawk scanning a field of
snow, hearts that mimic a family of sour-smelling mice curled togetherbeneath roots and ice, spacious as the journey of every stone.
3. Footprints follow me through wet snow. I crouch down, study the prints and laugh, recognize them as ones I’ve been tracking for decades, since birth. In my pocket there’s a black ammonite, a fossil that looks like a coiled snake without a head; a mollusk at least 66 million years dead: I run my fingers along the frilled suture lines. This is the only clock I know that tells the true time.
3. Footprints follow me through wet snow. I crouch down, study the prints and laugh, recognize them as ones I’ve been tracking for decades, since birth. In my pocket there’s a black ammonite, a fossil that looks like a coiled snake without a head; a mollusk at least 66 million years dead: I run my fingers along the frilled suture lines. This is the only clock I know that tells the true time.
