On the Edge of the Falls, Sarah Moore

 

 

This is a new language in which home makes no sound.

 

Violence whimpers his tune, hollow,

   and inside, story-caked hands push muddied

   earth into mounds tall enough to be 

 temples

which will burn before there is time

     to fall to our knees

as we thought we would.

 

Something between a monument and a gravestone 

 is a song,

Somewhere between a country and a family is an

 army.

 

There are ways to rewrite a song from memory,

but only if it is made slick, made to glisten with lush pain,

only if it will slide through war’s graceless chasms 

 

and return, 

triumphant as spit in 

the mouth of the desert,

and sing what we knew

before to be true,

but have  since forgotten.

 

Someone between a mother and a child is an 

 accomplice,

Someday between war and peace is a 

 battlecry: 

 

I will  lie in wait forever and

I will scream my throat bloody.

The song of home lives inside this small temple of myself.

This is an old language in which death has no

nation.

About the Author

Hallie Chametzky · Virginia Commonwealth University

Hallie Chametzky is a dancer, choreographer, writer, archivist, and researcher. She graduated in May 2019 from Virginia Commonwealth University with a BFA in Dance and Choreography and a minor in Psychology. Her writing has been published by Z Publishing House, Georgia State University’s The Underground, The University of South Carolina Press, The Library of Congress Performing Arts Reading Room Blog, and Pwatem Anthology of Literature and Art. “Song in the Shape of the West Bank” originally appeared in Amendment Literary and Art Journal.

About the Artist

Sarah Moore · Tennessee Technological University

Sarah Moore is a graduate student at Tennessee Technological University looking to go into the field of editing. Sarah was Managing Editor of TTU’s literary magazine for two years and currently works in the Engineering Department as a writing tutor. “On the Edge of the Falls” first appeared in The Iris Review.