hammering time
depression emerges
in perfect proportion to
how much wood she doesn’t position
how many screws don’t need her attention
she unskilled orders kits of more
more and more furniture
whose directions make sense
in her mold-addled mind
webbing obscuring geometric understanding
where things go
two cabinets sit
that she could not grasp
the doors do not close
Rubik winning in battle
watching improv to pass the time
waiting for germs
to evaporate
or whatever it is they do
steeps her in a sadness of decades of loss
a body that failed in art school
a troupe she couldn’t make
in a black mold building
never cared for because it had been for Black children before her
in that city worse than mississippi
one more way privilege cant escape the curse it causes
ill this thirty five years
and counting
two thousand miles from her art
two hundred miles and twenty years from a family
she just wants another wooden frame to put together
the balance
begonias unplanted thrive
thrown into the brush under limbs’ shelter
remind me stuff grows in woods
goatweed pops from driveway black dirt pile
yummily paid six hundred dollars for
Myrtle laughs at the ugly
I love the look, but just as
heat incinerates us to august ash
yang goatweed envelops
so this year I pick it out
I don’t need more anything that forces
male virility construct
begonia female of females
grows in her yin shade, no use to male hormones
but stretching nude on sheets of loam
Bio: Elle Brown
I am a medically retired indigenous-focused anthropologist writing in piney woods just east of a southern fault line with frequent authorial veerings into nature, illness, justice, and incompetent gardening, primarily through nonfiction and poems. I live with complete family estrangement and struggle with having experienced complete healthy community as a younger person but never finding that again, putting forth relational effort and grace in my interactions and not having that reciprocated, and the many attenuations of living in a body that is unable to bear with the level of pollution and irradiation of my lifetime.
Living an antiracist life as a third-culture kid in a body that looks middleaged Anglo female to others results in hourly grief from the stereotype and distrust of those around me whom I have values in common with, and the misprojection of -ist norms in my geographic area. For health reasons, but inconveniently, I live in a state that is where labor and disability rights afforded by federal laws are not engaged by attorneys due to “stacked” benches, leaving my feeling vulnerable and unsafe due to daily violations of basic disability rights by innumerable organizations I have no way to avoid or fight through standard legal channels.
Living in a body that is unable to adhere to the production requirements of a capitalistic setting, and unable to travel reliably or safely to places where that’s okay, I manage a sizable unpopulated chicken resort and high-oxalate sage flowers that only seem to grow in this one yard.