The Terroir of the Countryside
K.Blair
When you go home to visit your parents, you will go to the field behind your house to breath fresh air knowing it will do little to scrape the pollution lining your lungs. You will go to the field to pretend you are still a child, still untouched by responsibility, still awaiting your grand adventure. You will listen to the sound of bees pollinating and birds teaching their young to sing, and you will relish in biodiversity and the idea of a pristine wilderness. You will long for a true pristine wilderness. For all this to be untouched. For you to be untouched. You will stare for too long into a stream, at the layers of sediment, at the layers of history. River rocks run smooth by the caress of water, beaten down into the bed. You will stare too long into clear water until it is no longer a mirror. This is not reflection, it is distortion. If you reach out, you can pull this fluid version of you into existence. Perhaps they might make smarter choices although you think people will notice when they soak all the furniture and evaporate on a hot day. You will disturb a hare from its hiding place. It will fix a golden eye upon your face and look straight through you. Past marrow and viscera, to all the versions of you that have come before. It will look at your sedimentary layers, the defining features of your ecosystem and ask “which version of you is the real one?”
You will say nothing. You will turn tail and run home, arriving just as the kettle finishes boiling. You will drink tea. You will forget.
K.Blair (she/they) is a proud member of London Queer Writers and helps to run and host their LGBTQ+ spoken word night, SPEAK =. In June 2017, she took part in creating ‘A Poem For London’, at Spread the Word’s Young People’s Laureate for London Poetry Lab, and in 2019 was part of Apples and Snakes project, ‘The Writing Room’. They have been published in Spoken Word London’s Anti-Hate Anthology, The Valley Press Anthology of Prose Poetry and the Dear Damsels website. Their favourite band is The Mountain Goats, their favourite ice cream flavour is mint choc chip, and her husband didn’t really die in mysterious circumstances, that’s just the way she dresses. Twitter: @WhattheBlair, Instagram: @urban_barbarian.
← back | issue 1: NOSTALGIA | next →