The point is to be generous after you’re gone, though you’ve nothing more to lose. Even the old yak hauling your corpse up the butte is rewarded: once you’re slid off his back onto the icebound sod, the drover frees him, watches him amble away, snorting in and out, then in again, purest oxygen evaporating the densest of sin. After the vultures have had their way with the body once thought of as you, the master rises from prayer, hammers your bones down to sand-rubble for the crows who’ve waited their turn in order of strict descent. Your mother won’t grieve as if you’d been left whole. She knows the thing that lay untouched in her house for three days is no longer a contused hovel of mind. For this riddance of your worldly ordeal, she is thankful. For her and her kind, this is no day for wrung hands and regrets over a wasteful hole where seeds should be sown to breed new life—unassailable sense, the moment we can be said to exist, and then not. And you, bushwhacking through the bardo, are consoled, bared at last of all relics—admixture of your so-called self. Whether or not you can see the khandum lifting you into ether, all that matters now is emptiness, vista of boundless risk, rough food of rebirth, thawing beneath mountain sun in the vulture’s bony jaw. ______________________________________________________________ *khandum: in Tibetan Buddhism, wrathful female dieties shepherding a soul through the bardo (in Christian terms, purgatory). ///// Poet, interdisciplinary artist, and cultural worker Stephanie JT Russell’s most recent creative nonfiction book is One Flash of Lightning, a poetic treatment of the classical Samurai Code (Andrews McMeel). Her poetry, essays, and visual art have appeared in books and journals such as Colossus: The Body, The Xavier Review, The Winter Anthology, Sequestrum, Lightwood, ArLiJo, and at noted venues including The New Museum, The Griffin Museum of Photography, The Albright Knox, Bowery Poetry Club, and The Berkeley Museum. A visiting artist at New York University, The West Africa Network for Peacebuilding, and other institutions, Russell received the Overall Winner Award from the 2022 Wirral Poetry Festival, UK. A Trustee at The Emile Brunel Studio & Sculpture Park in Boiceville, NY, Russell is founder of its AIR Brunel BIPOC Fellowship Residency. Appointed Dutchess County Poet Laureate 2023, Russell is curating Stream of Life, a series of intercultural poetry and multidisciplinary art events from diverse Hudson Valley communities. https://www.artsmidhudson.org/dc-poetlaureate / www.stephaniejtrussell.com
Lightwood 