(River Spree, Berlin, Germany)
She Spree
- Avrina Joslin
She flows in parts not breaking but allowing slowly to collect in puddles or ponds and sometimes bays where the silver sail boats come to stay.
She’s come throttling through the wild, against stones and black rock, breaking into tinier and tinier crystals of the pure where intent is not separate from purpose or action.
She branches off from a mother whose blood she gives as she did, to orphans or children, the childless and the carrying, splitting into genealogy, spilling into reservoirs of organic womb.
She sprints in and out of action, rising and falling with bombs, walls, limbs decorating her banks with a chain of assorted events, their leftovers – smell of blood on a menstruating woman sniffed by dogs, forgotten by men.
She falls from cliffs as if her wings were lost to other winged beings who found her fit to fly along: amateur bird stepping off a cliff, falling a straight line to whirpools of undercurrent and swish.
At night she catches light on the mountainous pictures she draws on her skin and moves: a stretching game where your tattoos look like other things when you play with your skin.
She catches light and throws it away, making her darker and lighter under the sun, moon and canopies of trees who write history on her; a chronological accumulation of western wind on eastern heritage, hermitage packed neatly, under whose ribbons are conflicting currents
resting in peace. Her tadpoles, fish and dead debris drown to her floor where a few plants also grow. The dead can cap the alive, her leaves can gather dust but her water will wash it all away. She will sprint, spit, spread and resist.
She will Spree.