The ache of the forest reverberates on dewy skin
Spring loaded
As you bend your arm back to pinch forward
A sticky spider’s thread -
Gleaming iridescent
Veins of life; stretch
Dilating creatrix stories that begin in death
Tension in all directions
You tie worlds together; the material, to the tool
Send loose!
An arrow to the crystalline sky
Trailing a ribbon of fate; cascading spider silk
A strand of hair,
A cord,
Akin to an arcing comet
Which is caught, and suddenly pulled taunt
Between towering trees
Into zig zags that slice darkness open
A lightning bolt of language,
Intuitive code that permeates chambers of the heart,
Interlacing minutia
Counting out a fluttery beat
To be read by fingerprints
In future landscapes you will not meet
Thunder claps
(your hand reacts)
Pressing lightning into cloth.
2.
Skin is an organ, your room is a nest –
That chip in the wall, opens up another color, another container, a life your box (of a room) had before it was yours. Before it was a box it was breathable walls – beginning bones – pieces, trying to come together by guiding hands. Maybe skin came into contact, maybe contained inside the walls of this container there’s the oil (and salt of sweat) – seeped from skin. Maybe it means nothing – so far away – right there next to you. Maybe origins are everything –
maybe
they are gone long after we hold onto them.
3.
Open books and glued shut pages
Swimming questions, floating answers like
salt waters or bobbing buoys,
On horizons that pierce land and sky by
imaginary slivers
flattening into thumbnail images
unlocked by fingerprints we open books and turn our pages
_roladexs_without a finish
Long strings of found objects
pearls and rocks and fallen plastics
cut and drilled and polished
Swimming in megabytes
we ask our questions
grasping to answers
we build our shelters
Long strings in ribbons
historic mysteries
draped around you like beaded curtains
Illuminated spiritualities
that rain down truths and glossed casualties
Or do we honor each other more
by such modalities?
AHNIKA WOOD, Photography Credit: Karina Rovira, Shaye Garrigan