they told me Jesus would save me but i have done all of the footwork down here on the ground rolling my sleeves up seeing what i have a father who hates me a mother who ignores me a heart who turns the tenderness of each moment into a tornado i do the work ask questions write down thoughts understand learned behavior question patterns slowly brick by brick i build the church of my own presence and the altar of my own body
New Poetry by Saramanda Swigart: “Reckoning” and “The Small I”
BY THE ROOTS / image by Amalie Flynn
RECKONING
don’t worry about me i am not well but you’ve worried enough my prosperity has a body
count—
this shielded flesh conspicuous & allowed to be balks at being back-
ground—
this mouth taught (without being taught) it is clearest & loudest & purest squirms when it must shut up & become
ears—
i do not know how to be ears i know how to open my mouth monstrously wide to spew & eat
words—
words are my birthright & we the authors bulldoze other stories to rubble so the Other trips over each foregone
conclusion—
i am trained to make murder invisible but understories cling, bloody mine with the dragged, sullied
bodies—
of those disappeared beneath my own soft landing we need other & better
stories—
speak please, whatever you have to say— pull out this blighted story by the roots & plant a new one, green, tender, & worth
loving—
THE SMALL I
this is my country
look i overturn the junk drawer of my white/middle-class life and take stock rifling i find i am not a capital letter anymore first person singular has shrunk wizened down to that apple core i found beneath the car seat last month or that ivy there, brown and dead because i killed it the waxy leaf tree outside the front door (the city said we were its stewards in a single-page note in our mail- box) my heart brimming then with the largesse of new motherhood i thought i could take on the health of every tree in California but over the course of six years the ivy became a cloak around its trunk then an embrace then a stranglehold until tree leaves thinned i spent a long time tearing up the roots of that ivy now it browns— saved the tree but ivy clings a flammable bolus around its midsection
and the small i— how to locate i when i am both tree and ivy?