THE WAKE OF WE

a going concern

By Stephanie JT Russell

For what little it’s worth now,

we might as well be a boatful of grasses

beached on a highway: not the first time

we’d have met each other in the wrong

vehicle at the right nominal event. Or

mistaken it for something else entirely.

Yet here we are, believing there's room

enough in what's left of land between us

and sky to contain the end we’ve always

been becoming. So we push on through

the last inch of night, through sand-reed

and rust to planks of dune parting us

from the sea. Wading into the bull pines

at dawn, the young ones got here early,

chose pine stalks fallen on the duff mat,

then hauled them back to the beachhead

to stack crosswise for our incineration.

Watching us waft in like dawn light,

they know it is right to give us something

to do: so we take our weightless fingers

into the sedge and scavenge kindling.

Hunched over heaps of switchgrass,

blazing star, wildest rye, we gladly

remember we’re dead, because we can

hear the drinking’s begun, hours before

it’s time to light the pyre. And what else

should we expect? It’s no secret that too

much whisky clings to its place in the

chain of inevitabilities. At junctions

of dread and hilarity, it’s only natural

to drown the hiss of our particles

evanescing into the shoals. And if a punch

or two is thrown, it’s done in the name

of something at best like love, or at

worst, kinship—because we’ve never not

known we’d end up here together, settled

by the hearth of our collective going

concern. We knew we’d find each other

again one last time, to mourn the genome

binding us to men convinced that

cosmic cinders molt from their thumb-tips

and women whose eyes are a trousseau

of forests no one else may enter. At this

distance from them, from everything

I thought I was, believed you were, there’s

nothing left but the nourishing confection

of emptiness unraveling before us. I am

glad to watch the world collapsing

within my useless heart. Birds alight

our hands. Tidal pools birth one-celled

cities by our feet. It is almost too beautiful,

almost too right. Even so, I cannot forget

the mongrel breath of Unguentine and

cigarettes at the Holiday Inn where

Francis threw himself free of it all from

the seventh storey rooftop back in ‘81—

but this time my visual grammar parses

that deadly flight as if he might’ve landed

after all whole as newborn eggshell,

Pall Mall in his mouth the closest we’d

come to a cremation that day. And here

he is now, tucking phantom twigs into

the suttee in his fastidious way, drawling

something like better to be late to my own

funeral, than not show up at all. Maybe

Francis and all our figment dead have

shown up here now not to drop elegiac

spittle into the fire, but to remind us

the last thing we’ll each remember, or

see, or regret is the least combustible

fuel beneath this burning. And all our

dead —each one flitting in with a token

sprig of sage, or grief, of delight, or

surrender—agree it’s time to kindle

the tree bones, time for the young ones

to help us mount the wood pile. And

all our dead are happy: in a few smoky

moments, no longer submerged in our

memories of them, they’ll sigh O,

freedom — idle as a boat full of grasses.

The young ones are unsurprised by

how little remains of us in the end. Yet,

handed a jar the size of a soda bread

from the day-old bakery shelf, they

weep to find we weigh much more

than they’d ever dared imagine—weight

the sums of yearning, heft the kilos of

undoing, hectograms of ecstasies, tonnage

of walk, sleep, talk, wait. At last, it is done.

They have carried us beyond the wake of we.

Our theoretical mass, reduced to ashes and

sand, dives back, grit by grit, into the fire

from where it came.

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Prolific author, interdisciplinary artist, and cultural worker Stephanie JT Russell's most recent book is "nothing personal," a haiku and photography pamphlet. Her ninth creative nonfiction book, One Flash of Lightning, is a poetic treatment of the classical Samurai Code (Andrews McMeel). She is anthologized in books and journals such as Colossus: Body (Colossus Press), The Winter Anthology, The Arlington Review, Peregrine, and A Room of Her Own. Russell’s visual art, poetry, performance and curatorial work have featured at noted venues in the US and abroad, including The Griffin Museum of Photography, The New Museum, The Albright Knox Gallery, and The Shrine. A visiting artist and guest lecturer at cultural spaces such as New York University, Vassar College, and the Franklin D Roosevelt Historic Library and Home, at the invitation of the West Africa Network for Peacebuilding she designed and taught a collective playwriting and theater-craft program in post-conflict Liberia, as well as a professional development conference for K-12 Liberian educators. As Dutchess County Poet Laureate 2023-25, Russell curated Stream of Life, a series of 22 diverse intercultural readings. She is recipient of the 2022 Overall Winner award from The Wirral Poetry Festival Competition, UK, and the 2024 Jinquinteng Poetry Festival, Bangkok. In the catastrophic erasures of our time, Russell remains committed to write and teach on the empathic power of art, poetry, and creative public assembly.