Disturbances—a chapbook with Laura Marris

For Bushel’s summer show on water Laura Marris and I read together, and Bushel member Anna Moschovakis published a chapbook of our “Disturbances.” Laura and I are both writing books, both centered on place, land and its meanings, both coming out in 2024 and in all of this we have been writing to and for each other. So I feel incredibly lucky to get to write my “River Disturbance,” which is about a ghost river hidden in the Pepacton Reservoir, a plant— an obligate parasite, that depends on and grows from tiny rootlets of goldenrod, and my friend Gary Atkins’ memories of his childhood in Shavertown which along with that ghost river is gone… it starts here (but you an order a copy from Bushel — it is $5 or best offer!

1. I can picture the river but not the town, not the three churches or train station or rooming houses or factory, not the post office in the general store, not the next village up you can see from the bridge, not the bridge itself that collapses as the water rises, because the bridge is too sad to leave. What I have is this plant and its veins, the slim purple outline on the petals, the petals themselves begging hello. There is the nodding head and the golden hairs in its mouth, the yellow tongue as if to speak—and what would it say? Plus, the tea-pink stem the shade of my inner arm, and the relation of beauty from dry, cracking soil in a drought, and maybe this drought will again release the outlines of my friend’s childhood swallowed by the water.