Slogging on snowshoes 40 urban miles
Ice crevasse replaced by glass roof of a mall
Manhattan’s the destination of course
terrible movies require a ruined NYC circa 2007
a climate collapse at least telegraphed
art direction’s not bad
Lady Liberty iced over hair blown into icicles a hundred feet long
Simpatico audience in this Polar Vortex 2019
we huddle in a house blazed to 60F not bad but drafts dance cobwebs
frosted windows ping the whole house groans
we groan too Oh—Terrible Movie!
How we love thee
disaster flicks train our kids to win the apocalypse
so proud when the kid knows the heroes got it wrong
He doesn’t even have on gloves! Use food to distract the wolves!
odd intimacy when we holler OH NO
because the refuge turns out to be THE LIBRARY
librarians portrayed as passive and nerdy Who are they?
librarians we know could find the Holy Grail
shelved in Mysteries somewhere
or at least know how to research r-values of newsprint
corn chip fuel or hand sanitizer fire starters
Never mind I’m already proud as soon as she sees the stacks
our kid yells outraged Let me guess
THEY BURN THE BOOKS (she never would)
but Reader
they do
BEFORE ENDINGS & BEGINNINGS
“In trying to decide how I was going to illustrate a prompt – the arrival of Europeans to Turtle Island – in a manner that was neither too violent for a young audience nor one that sugar-coated the real story, I decided to depict the moment leading up to one of history’s greatest cultural collisions. I wanted to capture the more spiritual essence of the moment … where two flourishing worlds, one at a final peak of its existence thus far and the other at a peak of curiosity, converge. With no sun or moon or heavenly bodies, is it dawn or dusk? Exit and entry, beginning and end manifest through the same nexus.”
This feature is supported by
HEID E. ERDRICH poet
Heid E. Erdrich’s new book, Little Big Bully from Penguin, won a National Poetry Series award. She edited New Poets of Native Nations from Graywolf Press. Heid is Ojibwe enrolled at Turtle Mountain.
MOIRA VILLIARD artist
Moira Villiard grew up in the wetlands of the Fond du Lac Reservation in Cloquet, MN. She is a dynamic, multidisciplinary visual artist, known for her use of color and surrealism through mediums of illustration, painting, graphic design, and public art. She is also an award-winning community organizer, curator, and passionate arts educator concentrating her efforts around issues of equity, access, creative placemaking, and Indigenous representation.
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