Poetry
From Issue III (2018) Wreck of the Michigan: An Inquiry
with thanks to Ginger Strand
by KATERI KOSEK
In 1827, to attract tourists, hotel owners in Niagara Falls loaded up the schooner Michigan with wild animals and sent it over the Falls; as many as 20,000 people came to see the grand spectacle.
You set off on your horse in search of the cargo you won’t quite find:
the most ferocious beasts of nature—panthers, wildcats, wolves.
Easy enough to shoot some, but you need them alive.
You peer after shadows and snapped
twigs, feeling watched. The New World
is still new, the wilderness a dense green belt
around Niagara, inscrutable. Did you curse the folly
of your mission? Question this need to touch, to prove
~
Was it like heaving a branch into rapids—its bumpy progress downriver
oddly fascinating? Like dropping a bright leaf off a bridge
then running to the other side to see if it appears?
~
I keep dreaming I can touch the feral cat who lives in our house.
We have caught her, coaxed her, made her love cushions, windowsills,
treats from our hands, but her eyes gleam wild when you get
too close. In my dreams her fur, the color of bark and leaves,
is soft, and she never runs. Was it like that?
~
Was it the hypnotic churn of whitewater, its glassy sinews
wrapping and wending over rock?
To see how your own bones might crush?
Maddening, how you could saunter to the brink of wildness
but no farther. That white, cold power—
the only place you couldn’t go.
~
Nine years old, at a Plymouth Plantation schoolhouse:
on the ledge below the chalkboard, I find a small blue egg.
No one looking, I pick it up, test it between thumb
and forefinger—part of the display,
like everything else, I think.
You thought you couldn’t scratch
the wildness of this continent, thought surely the creatures would
swim to shore, shake themselves off, slip back into shadow
invigorated by the plunge. Of course
I squeezed until my blue egg shattered, real after all. Ashamed, surprised
and not surprised, I put it down, wiped my hands off, hoped no one
would see. Was it like that?—the new world more real,
more fragile than you ever imagined, its yolk
all sticky on your fingers?
Galápagos Giant Tortoise, Museum of Natural History | LAUREN GRABELLE
Archival inkjet print, 12 x 18 in., early 1990s
Kateri Kosek
Kateri Kosek’s poetry and essays have appeared in Orion, Creative Nonfiction, Catamaran, and Terrain.org. She teaches college English and mentors in the MFA program at Western Connecticut State University, where she received her MFA. She has been a resident at the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts in Nebraska. She lives in western Massachusetts and is working on a book of essays about birds.
Lauren Grabelle
Lauren Grabelle is originally from New Jersey, but moved to Montana to heal the wounds that are created by living in the most densely populated state and being so isolated from nature. Her photography falls in the matrix where fine art and documentary meet, where she can tell truths about human relationships to other people, animals, nature, and ourselves. Her work is about empathy. She has been exhibited nationally and internationally at Blue Sky Gallery, Arthill Gallery London, Colorado Photographic Art Center, Candela Gallery, Newspace Center for Photography, powerHouse Arena, Yellowstone Art Museum, SE Center for Photography, Station Independent Projects, Slideluck @ Photoville, Trieste Photo Days photo festival in Italy, and the Montana Triennial at the Missoula Art Museum, and online at Humble Arts Foundation, Der Greif, and World Photo Organization, among others. Her work has been published in The New York Times, Harper's, and the Virginia Quarterly Review.