Your God Will Forgive You but The River Won’t by Katherine Heigh

they came with sage and songs,
sweetgrass smoke swelling from shell to plume
to spaces he touched,
polluted places,
places where we still have to live
and die again each night
in the bedroom befouled
…………………(that’s why they told me to smudge it again)
sobbing sisters
and smoke_and songs to the birds
to carry him away from
places where we still have to live

a compulsion to sweep
…………………– they said it was right –
right out the back door
where they put a new lock
in case he tried to come back
they left me a braid of sweetgrass
in case he tried to come back

searching out his selkie ancestresses
to come collect their boy
a glass jar filled with nine nails
………………….– one for each year he stole from me –
prime years, nearly nine – the skin of a snake
and the hottest kitchen powders

graveyard dirt bought from two neighbour ladies
long in the ground by the lake
and the snippets of his identification
calling out to his selkie ancestresses
by the river that beats like a heart
in springtime sunlight sweet ducklings float

his death held in a glass jar
waiting for passers-by to part
so the river may take the jar
so may the drink take him
take him back to his selkie ancestresses
wash him from the earth
from the graveyard by the lake

from the places where we still have to live
we still have to live in our bodies
our bodies he touched,
polluted places

..

The recipient of the 2015 P.K. Page Poetry Prize, Katherine Heigh’s work has appeared The River Magazine, Eternal Haunted Summer, and the forthcoming anthology Voices de Queer Femmes VOL. II. Her first chapbook collection, PTBO NSA (bird buried press), will be published in the autumn of 2018.