Trista Edwards

LIVING AT INDIAN ROCK


Four months now since the quiet Inca
welcomed our landing.
I arranged and polished the silver,
blanketing the house in mirrors.
The moon quivers, pocked and white
as the tide. Every leaf is a footprint,
knitting a path with fig and smoke,
birthing Autumn under the roof.
Though the brooms guard the far corners
of our house we might veil ourselves
in the dust gathering on the coarse spires
of their hands or billow out with the rituals
rising from the hearth.
I lace emerald scarabs in the doorways,
link after link until they sag, Egypt heavy,
draping our shoulders like shawls.
We settle underneath.
Today I discovered one in the wooden bowl
nesting the oranges.
The bowl is not Africa,
my hand, hot as a minister's stare, crushed
the beetle against the bowl.
Derelict vermin, soiling the oranges with myth.
At night the linen snakes around our feet,
we grow dumb with fat while outside
our saddles rot in the snow.
And up the river, down through Rebel Trail,
grass patches over the footprints we once
dutifully stomped to warn the Inca
of our coming arrival.

Trista Edwards is an English graduate student at the University of West Georgia. Her poetry has been featured in The Eclectic and is forthcoming in Cause & Effect Magazine. She dreams to one day have a library in her house.