Riverstorm

“that the broken heart can cover more territory.” adrienne maree brown

Here’s my grief spell in conversation with the love goddess
adrienne maree brown

If my broken heart could blanket the earth
so strangers trip on its fractures
and still land soft
let it spread so wide that nothing here is lost
to the myth of ownership, separation, greed.
If it could do that, then this life,
and all I laid down, was worth it.

I call the river first, the old one,
silt thick with names we could not keep.
It remembers us without borders,
mouth of estuary open like a wound that will not lie.

I call the storm next, unbuttoned sky,
teeth of lightning, a drumline of thunder
that will not apologize for arriving loud.
Rage is also a weather, and mine has tides
it rises when I count the taken,
it breaks when I say their names out loud.

Let the river teach my grief to move,
to carve canyon from refusal.
Let the storm teach my rage to cleanse,
to strike only what cages, to split the locked door’s tongue.

Bring the salt, the body’s unspooling truth.
Bring the breath, coral light and stubborn.
Bring the drum, a ribcage, patient and precise.
Bring the hands, open, blistered, holy.

I spill the unsent letters,
and every no I swallowed to keep my glass family from breaking.
Let my blood draft a clause that refuses the rig
and gives the scorched acres back to Indigenous stewards.
At the family table plates freeze, chairs protest in scratches,
faces turn from me to wall. The river keeps the paper we tore
and lays the deed in silt.
Family name is family shame. I will not do this thing.
I will not follow you all. I will not absolve.
These minerals are not mine to own.
I renounce the blood right claim.
I return the rocks to their river bed.
Family, let this madness end!!!!!
Call the souls home.
Family, call your souls home!!!!!!!

I stitch my fury to my tenderness,
threading red to blue until they are the same river.

If the wave must crash, let it crash toward liberation.
If the wind must howl, let it howl our kin home.
If the banks must burst, let them burst the fences first.

This is my spell, not to forget, not to freeze,
but to be the flood and the clearing,
to be the hands that pull each other up, dripping, laughing, alive.

And when morning comes, let there be mud,
evidence of movement, footprints headed forward.
Let there be a sky rinsed clean enough
to hold our next brave breath.

Because the broken heart can cover more territory
and my will: a riverstorm, vast and precise,
carrying all of us toward each other home.
May the river find all who feel without a shore,
and carry you gently to a home made of us who refused
to sell
our souls.