Written by Patricia McCrystal
Photography by Grant Lemons
At the end of the summer I had to move
from the house of the elders
to the house of the moon
It was there I was made to speak for myself
to lay shape to words I had learned
but never used. Words like
memory,
like echo,
like sorrow.
Without doors, the ocean
swelled into my bed and unfolded rivers
of my own undoing, flows I had carved alive
while cowering in the shadowed corners of day
It was here I was made to swear to her and myself
to bleed only from sacred spaces-
those natal channels
lunar sanctioned
& so I sewed my hands back on
following instructions stitched inside a lullaby
one clinging threadbare to a low-tided memory:
a watersung echo
floating sorrow
In the night beneath her weeping skirt
I wrote letters to the elders in the sand
using words I learned the touch of. Words like
ritual, like
apology, like
knowing.
Patricia McCrystal studied Creative Writing at Colorado State University and continued on to receive a Certificate of Publishing through the University of Denver Publishing Institute. Upon graduation, she worked at the Boulder Bookstore as a bookseller and event host and then became the content editor for a small company in Louisville. She has been published in both poetry and non-fiction.
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