Sarah Browning is director of the Amherst Writers and Artists Insitute (AWAI), an organization which leads creative workshops for low-income women and children. She lives in Montague, Massachusetts.
I am living my life backwards - an island that grows slowly to latch onto her homeland.
Yesterday I took my own hand and said Self, come along with me; There are ravines, mosquito and earwig haunts you have never seen, There are places to go at an angle where the sidewalk is narrow and crumbling.
You are not alone but you will go alone.
Jennifer Montgomery said when we were 18: You don't have to think of only one way A story can be told with a face a hunger a beach a touch
There are places to go, it's true.
The inside of him feels like another world; how ancient storms would rage in their coming to be. A soup of riotous indifference, wild with black rivers tearing sludge and early amphibians all in a crush of hot temper, to the sea.
Our world hangs balancing its anxious days. No one believes today is felicitous and bright, the past notable for ignorance and too many dark-eyed dead. No one believes.
This is our world's secret: To clamor aboard the mortician's tasteful plan is our goal.
Hike up our skirts and wade into gore. We can step wherever we choose. The black river tears sludge and whatever is moving - like tension, like weightlessness, like love - to the sea.
I saw a bird this morning and it kept pace with me on my bicycle locked together in slapping propeller sounds of wings and wheels.
I was almost home. I was hot. The sweat of a million cells had broken out over my body. I wish I could say what kind of bird that bird was.
I can't. My life takes place in houses and attempts at the outdoors last thirty minutes. Not a study of trees, deciduous. Sometimes raccoons
startle me, that we kick around America with these gray cousins, their ringed tails, their dark shades. I see them most often as roadkill, quiet and curled by the side
of Route 47, like my cat curled to the sun.
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