Dani Netherclift
Emptied, those beds sketch blood maps, blotting red borders across the skin of Countries– the vast organ naked beneath absence snaking veins bear plangent mysteries memories of passing import silvered fish and stories, grasses, those who have died by drowning or thirst wisdoms we could not fathom old names cast aside, ways that might have could still maybe save our skins water ways forward and back roads taken trust and mistrust, all that hubris lies, poison, theft there’s nothing but the gouge of scar tissue ghost-flows writhing towards dry that blank of page only bone and dirge left to sing in witness to what was taken what lost, the dried blood of leavings.
Dani Netherclift lives surrounded by mountains in country Victoria. She was the winner of the 2020 AAWP/The Slow Canoe Creative Nonfiction Prize and has recently been published in Stilts Journal, Meniscus, Rabbit, and Recent Work Press’s anthology What We Carry.