A Pyric Victory / Interstitial Stitching

Two poems by Indiana-Belle Rubin-Tasic

A Pyric Victory

For God said,

Let man have dominion over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.

This widening fissure between human and thing –

natural thing, primitive thing, inferior thing,

is a faultline that cleaves apart the marrow of our being.

A miasma of subjugation that inseminates all of modernity.

Convergent movements asphyxiate things we can’t catalogue, classify, anthropify,

Those menacing things, regressive things, inconvenient things,

Until there is negation.

What perverted topography!

A system pillowed on bloodied stumps and ruptured rootage.

For man said,

Depose the roles that were never ours, we can reason our way through this!

Technophilic titans stand proud atop rubble and rot,

Reaching out for the stars,

Unaware of the sparks gnawing at our feet.

We guzzle the jaundiced vapour like parasites

And alternative visions vanish into eddies of blackness,

Collectively amnesiac,

Sleepwalking amidst the blaze.

Interstitial Stitching

Limbs throbbing with phantasmic pains,

We rub our eyes with vestigial grogginess.

Silver-lined visions begin to sharpen,

Like fleabane rising up through the cracks of an empty warehouse

That’s boarded up from its people.

Beside the warehouse, behind a bustling train station,

A community garden emerges on a bare patch of gravel.

Hands interlocked

with others,

with soil.

We resist within the interstice,

Hopscotching through multiple realms.

The collective retelling.

Undoing of stitches.

Unveiling of rusty scaffolds.

After critique comes creation, after ruin comes renewal.

We begin to restitch complementary and contradictory threads

To create a variegated fabric of existence,

Entwined with all relations of the Place that creates it.

Rainbows refract through the entanglement,

Mutual futures ricochet in all directions.

Mycelium gradually expands.

Fleabane covers ceiling holes and shatters warehouse locks.