Groundless This That and The Other Thing
That afternoon smelled like iron and sage and the screen door didn't latch ... something left open ... someone not home ...
Memory pours itself a drink and says the screen door didn't latch and nobody fixed it and that was the whole story ...
Veins underneath keeping the textile alive the way roots keep a prairie alive long after someone paved it and put a coffee shop on it where a woman in a good coat orders oat milk standing on a grassland she will never know is underneath her ...
A floating-into-a-frame accidental angel. Craft so quiet it looks like luck.
The Dakota elder woman's goat milk crate is the archive ... wooden and splintered and holding everything the barcode will never beep ... the preservationist arrives with cotton gloves and a climate-controlled van and the crate laughs so hard the slats rattle — sixty years outside is its own climate control ...
The expensive solution arriving to protect something that was never in danger from anything except the expensive solution ...
The rotisserie wrist rotates because the meat will burn if it doesn't ... try telling that to someone writing a grant proposal at midnight in a kitchenette that smells like ambition ...
Subsistence cuisine disappearing one grandmother at a time ... each one taking a pronunciation the grandchildren will approximate at Thanksgiving and get almost right ... almost right means the ear remembers what the mouth forgot ...
The adobe wall holds its own temperature the way your aunt held hers when your uncle brought home a three-legged dog and a woman named Francine on the same Tuesday ... set two extra places ... the dog ate better than Francine because the dog had the sense to be grateful ...
Cool inside when the world outside is callus ... thickened past feeling ... that professional skin that lets a committee walk across this crisis in dress shoes without limping ...
Zaca endurance ... callus so deep the skin stops distinguishing between hand and tool and material ... sewing that doesn't announce its stitches ...
The grandmother rejected the blue thread because the blue was showing off ... rejected the white because the white would pretend it was never there ... chose the brown because the brown was honest about being brown and would sit in the scar like a tenant who pays rent and doesn't redecorate ...
Both shut but only one remembers who did the shutting ... only one sends a bill ...
Carving — the only art that makes by removing ... the carver interrogating a block of wood until the wood confesses its face ... shavings on the floor are everything it tried to hide behind ...
Hand-mottled gloves erased from the narrative not because they were lost but because the narrative needed clean hands ... clean hands are the tell ... always the tell ... needed labor to look mechanical so the product could look inevitable ...
The greatest lie ever told in a font ...
Oaxaca pinching abstract signifiers ... someone said this represents instead of this is ... the pinch cracked it the way we crack a seed casing except nothing grew ...
The committee published a paper about it ... the paper won an award ... the award ceremony had a cash bar ...
The empty gloves are the permanent exhibit. Labor visible as negative space. A footprint in dried mud outlasts the foot by centuries.
Gleaning ... after the harvest ... after the machines have gone home ... what remains is what the system considered too bruised or too close to the dirt ...
Remains saying read us like a crime scene not a gallery wall ...
The system shifts its weight every time we think we've pinned a shoulder ... renames itself ... puts on a lanyard ... orders the shrimp ...
The moment we make something we can touch we've given grief a handle ... a handle is the beginning of a tool ... the tool doesn't care if we're crying ...
Reclamation walks in with the damage still showing ... wrinkled shirt ... no briefcase ... says this is mine now including the parts you broke ...
Presence can be confiscated but absence cannot be seized ... we cannot arrest what isn't there ... that hole in the archive has more gravitational pull than the shelves around it ...
And everything arrives at a round crocheted horse keister doily ... thread and a hook and unpaid time protecting a chair from the sweat of a workhorse's rump ... hold it up to the light and it's the whole case ...
Pattern older than the university that named it folk craft ... round as every calendar that predated the grid ...
The keister is the part of the horse that faces you when the horse is doing its work and moving forward ... nobody writes an ode to the keister ... the keister doesn't need one ...
Totemic punctures ... mouths not holes ... the merchant's stomach knows before his ledger and his stomach has a better track record ...
Instability moves through a valley and the ones closest to the ground feel it first ... the door left unlocked so the neighbor's kid could eat before school ... trust and Tupperware that never gets returned and somehow both parties are fine with this which is more than we can say for most treaties ...
Copper changing color with air ... green means years ... bright means new ... the Tuesday between the old way and the new one ... relics that leak ... that admit rain and rot ... impermeability is for tombs ...
The crotch doesn't lie. Nine hours on a wooden bench selling what we made with our hands. The crotch has never filed a false return.
Hemp twisted into rope that can hold or punish depending entirely on who grips the end ... the rope is the doily is the hemp ... pot cooks and heats ... rope ties and disciplines ... vessel carries water and prayer ...
Single-use is a luxury invented by people who never had to make one object do the work of five ... they also invented the word artisanal and charge eleven dollars for bread our ancestors got for free ...
The punctures remain. Each one a small mouth saying we were here. The copper is green now. The hawk is still watching. The merchant's stomach still knows before his books do.
