death came into my house

by Daniel Swenson

 

my house was not always like this. listen, come close.

I was seventeen the day that death came here.

and it was good before then because I was not aware

of things or many things, I should say, and the way that

I was not aware was that I could feel with my whole heart

the way I wanted to. the heart knows what it wants

my mother had told me and I felt

like wind on ice, and I had never thought this momentum to stop.

 

I remember well his voice, and the way

I realized his eyelashes stretched on forever and against my breastbone

and things were good and I was good and

I was seventeen and the whole town that I lived in was at my door

and they told me how they were new there

and how they saw me in the lamplights at midnight with him and oh

what thoughts they had of me and oh they brought a sense of

this to me and my house.

 

they told me names for who I was and who I am and what this meant

and oh what history my family had in this town and oh

how they hated to see me here, as though I had never been here

or if I had been, how abhorant it was to be, or to be seen.

 

I grew vines around my veranda

and from then on I was beach glass all shaded and smooth,

widdled and made

undone from what I was and what I would come to be. Something to be

collected by this town, worn around their necks,

to ward off evil. an evil I was. death had come to my house.

 

****…***

 

I wrote this piece with mixed feelings. I wasn’t sure what my role was, memorizing and reading King’s story. What are the histories involved in white settlers appropriating and re-telling indigenous stories? Once a month a group of friends and I get together to trade clothes and drink wine and read from something that we’re working on. I’m fortunate enough to be surrounded with some brilliant and smart artists and writers so I thought this would be an interesting opportunity to read to them my re-imagining of King’s story of evil coming into the world. I wrote it in a lot more succinct and deliberate way the piece but while I was on the Canada Line to my friend’s I began to re-write it in verse-poem form. The idea and meaning behind my relational understanding of evil or the introduction or realization of it was made knowable (or tellable) to me by reading it through the lens of an introduction to heteronormativity. Thinking in terms of a time when I was not aware of what my queerness meant in the world was perhaps a time that I could relate to King’s ‘pre-evil’ time. I still feel complicated with this story and welcome feedback/criticisms on it.

 

Works Cited

 

King, Thomas. “I’m not the Indian You had in Mind.” Video. Producer Laura J. Milliken. National Screen Institute. 2007. Web. April 04/2013. http://www.nsi-canada.ca/2012/03/im-not-the-indian-you-had-in-mind/

Oswald, Ramona Faith, Libby Baiter Blume, and Stephen R. Marks. “Decentering Heteronormativity: A Model for Family Studies.” 2005.