Nathan Erwin

Text messages from my mother

arrived in the Creek Valley Aquifer, slowly,
feeding into Dryden, radiowave river-memory:
Why didn’t you call? When will you come home?
Quarries of sleep, the locked gates of Cornell, our breath
runs to rain, rain to stream banks, flowing past the tiny games
of children who we will never know. Yesterday’s fields,
where the Amphitheater Glacier once stood, germinates
a circle of beings in transformation—milkweed, moths,
moths, Catalpas that crept up the Appalachians. Here, there are three poisons.
Together we text everywhere,                             every day we discuss our inheritance.
Delusion, anger, and craving. A worm moon fire ceremony,
cleansing bow drill embers. We listen
to the fire & for the thousand-mile song of the ovenbird.

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Nathan Erwin is a land-based poet raised on the Allegheny Plateau, the northernmost tier of Appalachia. A community and institutional organizer, Erwin currently operates at the Pocasset Pokanoket Land Trust building healthy futures for indigenous farmers and organizing around land, food and seed sovereignty. His writing has recently appeared in The Journal, North American Review, Poetry Wales, Bombay Gin, Hunger Mountain and Ninth Letter. His organizing and his poetry are conversant, so he writes about foodways, myths, medicine and wanting.