‘Sheers of Fire and Ice’

Photographer - Tobi Brun

Sheers of Fire and Ice

I am born of virgin skin and white eyes.

Matted in my mother’s blood, with strong hands I am lifted to the skies.

I hear cries and “oo”’s and remarks of my unfavorable size,

“We thought she would breed something of a prize.”

But my ma embraces me in her full-textured coat

as she exhales with me in a rhythm we both have just wrote.

The strong hands gathered to talk of me and to gloat,

their conversation continued over the first “Bah” I let from my throat.

My mother and I lay positioned in the corner,

sheltered by painted red wood and hay stored around the border.

Dirt sprinkles down onto us with smells of my unspoken fate of horror,

Something in Ma’s cradle told me our lives would be shorter.

Just feet from us, those standing note my potential and worth:

the amount I will eat, the warmth of my wool, and my girth.

All of this greatness that I have had since the time of my birth,

are they just to use it until my last days on this earth?

I looked into Ma’s eyes, downturned and pretty,

was this a look of love or an expression of pity?

This was what life would be for me, I am now privy:

I am to grow how they like, it matters not if I’m lionhearted or gritty.

My questions waned with the rise of the moon.

The weighted silence of the barn hummed with its dark history a tune;

the flesh before these bodies have been scattered and strewn,

they all asked how they could live knowing it’d all end too soon.

Before I know, my train of thought is interrupted

by a sliver of daylight on my face, I get up as it instructed.

My knees knock and shake, a confident walk they obstructed.

One hoof at a time, I move wobbly and jagged as I grunted.

The wet of my nose leaves a mark on the splintered barn door

as I swing it out of the way, the creak matching Mum’s breathy snore.

Light and color hit my crusted eyes, morning sun washed my despair of yore.

How could this bonny kingdom breed these men with the words of a boar?

The bitter wind carried a mist that studded the ends of my hair.

At the tail of the gust lingers a musk strong and agrar.

Powdery ashes and old smoke prove eruptions previously aflare,

this land’s fire and ice seem to be a balanced affair.

Warm tones of earth run up to the muted sky of grey.

Green hills are brushed with flaxen grass and charcoal clay.

Four-legged things like me are out to graze and to play,

do they know what I do– that we live to be prey?

All this beauty and wonder is hidden behind this question:

How am I to enjoy this life when it only goes in one direction?

I am to die at the hands of those who debate my perfection,

while also finding my own purpose without air of madness or objection.

I want more for my life than what I understand is given to me.

Why am I being pigeonholed into something that others think they foresee?

My death cannot be my only gateway to feeling free,

and it is now my duty to find my own true destiny.

I take a step forward and turn my petite head around,

I see the still body of my ma lying peacefully on the straw mound.

If I can sneak out while she is asleep soft and sound,

then I can come back and show her what more for me I have found.

My neck snaps back forward and my ears tense up straight,

another inch I move my hooves and pause to look at the land so ornate.

I breathe in the smells from the barn before it’s too late

to remember what it feels like before deciding my own fate.

The soft grass tickles my bony shins as I walk,

and my eyes squint from the air sprinkled with particles of chalk.

I approach some new friends lying in the pasture, hopeful to talk,

but I’m met with unbothered stares and mouths open just to gawk.

Their coat was unlike mine, spotted in brown and black.

Before I could speak, I was interrupted by one from the pack.

“Are you the one born today from inside the shack?

Why are you out here? Don’t you think you should see to your Ma and go back?”

I stand afront the group of marble-covered beasts.

Stunned at their unwelcoming and sorry attempt at my retreat.

“I came out to see you, to see the earth and its sweets.

Truthfully, I stand here in pursuit of finding what makes me complete.”

Their pink snouts turn away and some of them even huff,

a small creature from the back stood up from behind the green fluff

to tell me how none of them believe in all that kind of stuff:

“We sit here together in the sun and the flowers, that’s more than enough.”

I scan over the crowd cuddled tightly and nestled in,

not one of their bovine faces not in a grin.

But they’re just like those before me, they failed to ever begin

looking for their own purpose, their lifeline, failing to look within.

I retort and tell them that I have a purpose I must find,

I thank them for speaking with me and for being open and kind.

They wave me goodbye as their bodies again intertwined,

I turn my back and sigh, thinking that all their lives have been resigned.

My infant joints are adjusting as I turn upwards on a hill,

perhaps what I am looking for is up at the top near the mill.

I notice the beauty of violet poppies and Mountain avens just until

I remember my mission is to fulfill and not to find thrill.

I finally reach the peak after much huffing and heaving.

Catching my breath, thin air pierced my dry throat, so much for speaking.

The grass was not as long near the windmill that was achieving

a wind that gustoed and shouted, leaving me grieving.

As the weather was less than desired at the top,

I was pleased to see a peaking hoof just behind the mill to the left of a flower crop.

I skip toward the wooden structure, moving like a marionette with a flop,

hope builds for my purpose and down my cheek rolls a teardrop.

I hop around the corner to the back to look for the owner of the foot,

but my upturned mouth quickly shuts in horror as I see what’s afoot.

Another white creature just like me is standing facing me, covered in soot.

Her eyes had something old in them, and her wornness sank in her caput.

Still did I stand. Unsure what to say, suddenly I forgot the meaning of today.

Feeling my confidence dwindle, I fought to keep this new feeling at bay,

then I move myself closer to explain why I have intruded on her day.

“Ma’am,” I say softly, “I think you can help me on my journey. That I pray.”

The nearer I came to her, the more I understood

that she was closer to my age in my young girlhood.

Why were her eyes dark and her hoofs chipped like aged driftwood?

Why did I feel a sadness when she looked at me such as Ma under the red wood?

“Are these your flowers?” I questioned, “They’re really quite nice.”

She stared at me with an expression rather empty, blinking twice,

“If they are beautiful as you say, what do you say is their price?”

I wondered what she meant, “Oh, I didn’t come here to buy, I came for advice.”

The girl motions behind me and down the hill I just scaled,

“Do you see all of the floral lives you ended all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed?”

Flattened stems show my trail and under my feet the delicate petals were unveiled,

“I wonder why you think your journey is worth the lives of flowers?” she exhaled.

“I’m sorry I didn’t mean to hurt them, my ma would be upset.”

“Oh, and your mother, I see you’re a babe, don’t you think that she frets?”

I remember Ma’s soft breath, her warm full coat. “Where is your ma? I haven’t seen her yet.”

The lamb before me looked down at the earth, the wind held our silence singing a duet.

“What is it you wanted to ask me?” Her voice cracked and low.

“I came to find my purpose. My reason for living, Something to relieve me of my woe.”

The babe shook her head, moving it over to glance at the crushed indigo,

“Don’t you see that what you had before is all you need tomorrow and all you needed long ago?”

“The perfume that called you out, the musky air, the land charcoaled and chalked.

The sun the cows lay in, the wheated grass that prickles your legs as you walked,

the flowers you forgot to admire before leaving them, with your life you now mock.

Not to mention your home in that barn nested below this bedrock.”

Before I had time to think of an answer that would suffice,

her eyes met mine and her voice bellowed the worst words one could splice:

“My mother is dead, killed the day of my birth. Slaughtered with sheers of fire and ice.

That’s what we are here for, you know this, to be served atop a bed of rice.”

My heart was ignited and my eyes flowed over with water,

“They cannot kill her when she has a newborn daughter!”

“I know that you have feared your own death since you understood the slaughter,

but the first to go are the oldest. It is not you, it is her.”

I turn to run back to my red barn to find my ma and make things straight,

but not before I could hear the last words spoken from my mate.

“Your fate may be death, but so is every living thing’s to date.

Do not get lost in finding a purpose when you lose what matters before it’s too late.”

Tears burn my hot face,

I think I let out a cry one could hear from outerspace.

The keratin covers of my toes scratched and chipped from my pace,

I can’t think of anything else other than picturing Ma in her same place.

Finally, I reach the large splintered door still ajar,

my heartbeat reached my ears when there was no sight of movement near or far.

It was then that I hear the sound of metal, perhaps the shot of an engine from a car?

To my left, I see a sliding door, sealed with a bar.

Ramming my head through the wood to get through,

I know I must muster every ounce of strength in order to breakthrough.

I hear shouts from the voices I knew early in my birth, corrupt and evil. Ugly, too.

The wood cracks and springs out after one final push as I come flying through.

Shaking myself off, I feel my knees weak again and now bruised from the thud.

My eyes adjust to the light that entered my irises with a flood,

but in this moment I regret ever opening them and expecting a truck with an engine dud.

Instead, what I see is far worse: Ma laying still. Covered in blood.

Her face looks at me, painted red like our barn.

Her eyes are wide open looking at me, metal sticking from her head like a horn.

The men that I remember who once held me when I was born,

now held onto the smoking gun and the firey sheers. And now my ma I must mourn.

Karlyn Rainey is a 22-year-old writer who studied professional writing and rhetoric and film and digital media at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. She has always enjoyed creative writing, especially longer-form poetry and fictional short stories. While creative writing is one of her hobbies, she also enjoys hiking, making bread, making collages, and painting for her online website, karlynrainey.art, in her spare time while balancing job hunting in technical writing or editing. She hopes to continue writing creatively while growing her career and continuing to do everything that she loves.

‘To A Student’

Photographer - Tobi Brun

To a student who wrote that poetry is an ineffective way of providing social commentary because “if it was effective then why do all these social problems exist.” Allow me to answer your question.

Perhaps it’s because students don’t take the time to read them, students who plagiarize their way through the school year whilst proudly proclaiming none of this is relevant to their future. Perhaps it’s because people put on blinders so they can only see the white tips of their shoes and ignore everything that they see as “unnecessary.” If it has no worth in this moment to you, it
must have no worth at all. But where will you turn when you’re hurting so deep that your very soul aches in your chest? Will your biology textbook be there to show you that you are not alone? Will you find solace in computing a mathematical equation when your world crumbles around you?

If you truly have not felt your heart fall into your shoes, if your knees have never buckled from the weight of the baggage you carry, then I am happy for you. I am so glad you have never experienced sitting awake at 12am with fresh tears on your face and loneliness hogging your covers, wondering if ever in history anyone has been where you have been.

Society has told you The Cure surely must lie within the web of social networks and so you turn on your phone but only find empty inboxes and timelines full of smiling faces.

But perhaps there, in the endless tide of photoshopped scenes, you will find a voice that shares your pain. Perhaps you will hear the flow of stanzas in a new light when your soul is what’s hurting. At 15 years old, you know so little about the world and even about yourself. Times will come when your boat is rocked and the sea of life threatens to swallow you whole. In those times, I offer you this poem as a reminder that you are a dynamic being. That you can choose to be different, to evolve. And that poetry is there to hold you when arms are not enough.

See, Poetry is not the solution, but the salve. We need legislative action and community building to do most of the work. Instead poetry is there to remind you that when life kicks you down, you are not alone. When the world tells you that you aren’t enough, it is there to tell you that you are made of stardust and held together by magic. You are a wondrous creature alive on this beautiful planet and that is enough. Poetry is there to comfort, to inspire, and if nothing else, to allow the writer to find their own peace.

I will not apologize for sharing this all with you because for every kid like you I have five who are hurting and looking for the rest that poetry provides. The world is full of so many demons and so much pain. I am no exorcist, but these two hands will always be there to press this page against the wounds of those who fall. If poetry is not for you, I wish you no I’ll will. There are plenty of things I dislike too. But what I will not entertain is the disparagement of something I need to survive like water on my lips and food in my belly. For I know, through all the poems you disdain, that I am not alone. May you find the same comfort.

Natianna Ohmart is a high school English teacher in Independence, Missouri. She lives in a little blue house stuffed full of five cats, one psychotic dog, and an untold number of houseplants. She finds her purpose in advocating for and implementing anti-bias teaching and encouraging young writers to find their voice.