| Frances Payne Adler USA The Voices Are Coming Up "In the first years of the twenty-first century, it was discovered that voices, all the unheard ones, didn’t die at the end of life. Instead, they spent thousands of years, wandering underground. …It was an earthquake like no other." - Frances Payne Adler, from “Raising The Tents,” 1993 For Julie Bliss, in search of Mary Garner Cole, 1863 – 1939 You are a search party traveling back for your great grandmother, for years you’ve been studying Choctaw, you hear faint directions cracking open, you track them back, uncover them in ditches of history books, the songs the whispers of family stories, a name, a date, a town inscribed in a bible,/ a page in a diary, homestead documents in a thin drawer, calling you under the canyons the coasts of California to Iowa to Missouri, and in your face the clocks are clanging the docks banging together, wind, waves, and fluid fields of corn hang over hang under you, you pitch the tents of your questions. Grandmother, speak to me, you say, and you can hear her, calling you back for the voices, for the years she’s been chanting Choctaw, not stripped from your family, not lost to the conquerors, not lost to marriage nor to gods, she’s calling you, your great grandmother, knowing you’ve retrieved the eyes to see her, the ears to hear her, her words, to have them surface the centuries, the years between you, you will crack the dry earth of silence, tell the stories she hands you, broken stories no longer, no longer leeched of her truth, her blood no longer sapped from you * Published in Cracking the Earth: A 25th Anniversary Anthology, Corvallis, OR: Calyx Books, 2001 A Call To Arms
and Breast Cancer
"What possible choices do most of us have in the air we breathe and the
water we must drink?"
- Poet Audre Lorde, who died in 1992 after 15 years
of living with breast and liver cancer. From A Burst of Light
"Women with the highest exposure to the pesticide DDT, have four times
the breast cancer risk. "
- Mary S. Wolff, PhD., chemist, Mount Sinai School of Medicine, N.Y.
She grew up eating berries beans apples and peas and stuffed her bra with socks
She grew up eating grapes and greens, and on TV, breasts sold beer and cars and
musk perfume, jeans and jewels and junket tours, breasts and chests
and marketing plans, these golden globs, these silken globes
It sinks in early this thing with breasts, sinks into her
through apples coated with poison, poisons sliding down her throat
to her breasts, spreading like fingers along the milk route
Breast cancer, they tell her, we have to cut it off, they say, and they do,
and someone is singing chest bust bosom tits chest bust bosom tits
And they talk to her of fitting her for a fake one, No one will ever know, they say
Know? she says, I want everyone to know, I want to run up and up the streets
calling to women wearing prostheses, to yank them from their chests, to scatter
them on sidewalks, let everyone see us one-breasted women, millions of us
How long are we going to go on killing women, she says, a chant, how long,
a prayer she murmurs as she slips in and out of sleep, killing women, her kidneys
giving out, her liver giving out, yellowing her skin, leaving her itchy, scratchin
at her flesh, longing to get out of it and on to a world that makes some sense
And in her deathdream, breast cancer researchers collect the tossed prostheses,
trade them in like used bottles for gold from corporations who made millions
from all the cars from all the beer that breasts sold
* Published in Cracking the Earth: A 25th Anniversary Anthology,
Corvallis, OR: Calyx Books, 2001
© All Copyright, Frances Payne
Adler. |
