Context, in Avoidance of Rupture // Language Towards Stone and River

context is what is most important to me - d.b.

This is poetics as abstraction.

What is the context

of active amnesia:

the state. Funded

poetry as erasure.

How do we read

with sensitivity here?

A field of stone

is parking lot;

The invisibility of hills

named fallow ground.

Skies changing with accumulation

of both the potential (read:

capital, read: hotel, read: poetry

on sidewalks) and the effects (read: debris

read: the dialectics of development).

A field of stone is a building site

or a giant fucking hole.

I heard no one

asked any one

about much

especially the network

of old coal shafts

that run beneath the city

and if disrupted

would collapse

the whole

armature.

so much can be passed over

in avoidance of the rupture🔺 - l.r.

Gloria Neapetung

designed the street

sign for Okisikow

way. “during and prior

to treaty making

it would have been the

okihcitawiskewak

who would have

been consulted

regarding the land,

because the authority

and jurisdiction to speak

about the land

resides with the women🔻.” (55)

What life ways

weaved here? What

ruptures suture?

What protocols

attend the denial

of presence - what

laws might honour

its persistence?

I listen here

but I do not pretend

to know.

I stumble

through

language

towards stone

and river. ______________________________ 🔻McAdam, Sylvia. Nationhood Interrupted: Revitalizing neyihaw Legal Systems. Purich, 2015 🔺Robertson, Lisa. 3 Summers. Coach House, 2016.