Earth
eight hundred years before
Let me tell you a new tale.
Through the eons, I become something new, re-forming and evolving, my plates jostling mountains and carving rivers, the stretch of a valley, the burst of a volcano, my body reconstructing again and again.
Alteration is something I know. But now change comes suddenly.
Once, my body was wide, sweeping prairies and lost forests.
Now, they hammer metal veins into my forearms, the railroads fissuring like river and tributary across my chest. Once, the buffalo rubbed their backs on my grassland, their rolling creating rainwater wallows for birds.
With their hooves, they aerated my soil for new growth.
But the buffalo disappear. And I am thirsty.
My skin crackles and withers, and faraway through time, dust storms blossom across my robe.
The cries are getting louder. They writhe and they ache.
Across my body, women are screaming. It’s time.
Minnie, do you hear me? I see you pause, watch the scatter of shadows between the hickories, and I’m trying to tell you—I understand heartbreak, I understand lonesome. But you’re not alone. There’s a community of women waiting for you.
For you to know the ancestry of this land, we must start at the beginning.
Once, longago before time, there was a woman named Prairie Rose.
She’s the woman in your mirage—burrowing through bramble, journeying somewhere unknown.
Prairie Rose lived. But then, she was remade into folktale.
She becomes a flower, made of petal and thorn.
While a southern wind rages, she battles to bloom on my meadows.
Whirlwinds, always blustering against wildflowers.
Have you heard the unearthly tales, of the violent removal of the Natives, the unfathomable horrors and brutality?
I watched. An era full of anguish and terror.
Haunting voices bled into my body, sorrow loop-stitched up my spine.
The echoes of Prairie Rose’s agony quakes through my fields and my woodlands, her wails tangle inside the void. But, she endured. She bloomed.
Prairie Rose is just one of my stories, there are many.
Winter comes again, and I shudder. Haze creeps like gossamer over my meadows; the midnight hours lengthen and swell; the wind whips. Crevasses gnaw between my bones, hot flashes swamp over my shoulder blades, my body weary with age and mistreatment.
Minnie, are you listening? I’m rewriting memory.
I chronicle a narrative of this land, of these rolling hills nestled up to Crooked Creek. Of the women who’ve walked here—and the history they left behind. Do you understand? Like a quilt draped across time, women patchwork across my body. Lives stitched together, the quilted pattern repeating.
The story, this folklore of women, is always beginning again.
Let’s restart.