SUGAR MAGNOLIA WILSON
Crane Fly
She has common objects there,
a blanket, only the necessary bowls, some eating utensils. Things are
simpler and things are done with much weight and gravity.
There are rituals, common rituals that involve
body and water and stone. Cleaning. Drinking. Being still.
When I visit my mother she is a transparent crane fly. The house is so beautiful.
There is cleared land and a fence, beyond which there are fields with wildflowers and
this is bordered by tall rows of trees.
She is a crane fly. A crane fly.
Cycle
Mothers contain fertile silence. They emerge from shapeless gentleness into textured
gentleness, and often mate with portions of this abstract materiality. Mothers search for
mates by walking great distances or sometimes flying. The connection of fertile silence
with abstract materiality takes a few minutes and may be accomplished in flight.
Mothers are therianthrophic and have a lifespan of 100 days after which they dig their
bodies down into wet soil or beds of algae and emerge hours later in familiar but
untouchable forms. Once reborn, Mothers lay their realised gentleness onto the
surface of a domestic water body or into the corner of a white room, and some simply
rop them in flight, their inherent sensory faculties allowing them to measure where the
wind will carry their young. Most eggs will be isolated. The surface of each egg has a
crack which channels light out into the darkened world. This light may help to anchor
the newborn to the empty room to which it arrives.
Lake
There were lights here last night
charging up the dark matter between us
and the water and the water
and its sister, the sky.
It is impossible to touch you.
I don’t know who said this, it was either
you or me or somebody’s drowned
childhood friend, lost and lost and
lonely forever on the bottom of the
bottom of the lake.
Somebody told me there is no
bottom to this lake. That the water just
goes down goes down and down forever.
The lake has a long memory a long
memory, a large imagination.
When my mother left, the spring
on our land didn’t change. The water didn’t
stop didn’t stop bubbling up from below.
It didn’t cover itself in a shawl of blackbirds
to indicate grief.
Each litre of water that came up
was different from the next and the next
and each time and each time after that
when I took a drink a drink I became
a dark blue lantern teeming with invisible life.
Nobody had gone anywhere at all.
Nobody was ever not lost at the bottom
of the lake because in the lake
it is impossible to be a stranger.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sugar Magnolia Wilson lives in Wellington but hails from the Far North. She has had poems published in Turbine, Shenandoah, Verge: Errance, Sport, Foodcourt and Hue & Cry among others. She co-edits the online literary journal Sweet Mammalian with Hannah Mettner and Morgan Bach.