If Icarus Was a Drone
by Bec Bell-Gurwitz
Jordan Tierney, Worker’s Ceremonial Garment, Late 21st Century, Jones Falls Settlement, vintage leather shoulder pads, tool handles, grommets, twine, 65 x 28 x 10 inches, 2022. Courtesy of the artist.
If ICARUS WAS A DRONE
Bec Bell-GURWITZ | MAY 2023 | Issue 23
I.
Under the paper sky,
rain was reliable but when my tongue reaches out
there is little relief
I am thirsty,
wanting to cry out
but there is no water
we have been in drought for long enough
I read it in the news but didn't really believe it
until there was none left for me—
every mouth suckles up to the sky.
We are at war, at war
But the streets are silent,
seem safe enough
we are all thirsty,
thirstier than hungry,
though I’ve always confused the two
Each generation has its virus,
its war
I wish ours had given us wings,
flown us
to some other universe,
one with warmth and abundance
Or at least I hoped for a better lesson,
what we could learn from flying too close to the sun
Though I have been careful,
my lungs become winged.
I want to catch them before they
grow into what I can't nourish,
what flies too close to the sun and burns up.
In the beginning
someone I love
said
they would like to catch the virus
because
it would link them to everyone else,
burning from feverish
body to body:
do we only know
connection
in pathology?
Are we stuck in our ashes waiting
for something beautiful to come from all of this breaking?
II.
The doctor says I have
an overgrowth in my lower intestine;
bugs that eat up my nutrients,
wash through me take what they want
We are a feed endlessly regenerating,
Start back
at the beginning make it seem new
Twitter keeps me up at night with
hot takes on my body
on the war
on how to become
someone who cares
It builds like clay
in my intestines,
and my doctor warns
I am more vulnerable to viruses, to diabetes, to being dead
being dead seems sweet sometimes in this economy
In this economy,
I like to feed the bugs—
they are as hungry as anyone
III.
When my mother was sick her body became clay,
dusty Sculpy stuck in different colors,
a child’s hands sticky and careless.
She grew and grew into the mold of
a human shape until she surpassed
even those bounds, cancer, they told us,
has no humility, and her body had wasted away
invasion cells blinkered and multiplied,
and many of her bones were replaced,
so we questioned whether she was really herself anymore
and her hair fell, not like Samson’s,
and she cried when we said her wig made her look
not like herself so she took it off
and more hair fell this time, plastic this time,
and I’m sure she could feel it happening,
This becoming so human she was no longer human
not Icarus flying so close to the sun.
Sometimes I dream of my mother with her rebuilt breasts,
scarred along her nipples and
sometimes I want to cut myself off there too,
in solidarity, yes, but also,
being a woman or a man
feels too simplistic for this age
a body that does not transform seems
ill fitted for this age
I want to be spared of
my mother’s illness,
yes,
but more so I want to be an endless being,
my own seraphim
a phoenix, built up like cities,
falling down again
and rising out of the fall
Bec Bell-Gurwitz is a writer living in Northampton, MA, on unceded Pocumtuck land. Their work appears in the anthology Strange Attractors: Lives Changed by Chance, The West Trade Review, The Citron Review, Thrice Fiction, and others. Bec won Writing by Writers’ 2022 San Juan Residency, is a 2021 Pushcart Prize nominee, and placed as a finalist for The Southwest Review's Meyerson Fiction Prize. Bec is currently an MFA candidate in prose and teaching associate at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.
Jordan Tierney lives and works in Baltimore, MD. Always an artist, she has also worked as an illustrator, building renovator, gallery owner, and museum exhibit fabricator. Her artwork has always been the result of intimate knowledge of the terrain she walks. She worries about climate collapse, and especially her daughter’s future. She is awed by the abused urban streams and forest buffers of Baltimore City. The beings struggling to survive there inspire her to use her skills and a little sorcery to change the valence of trash she collects from negative to positive. This process of observing nature, collecting trash, and making visual poetry has become a spiritual practice. Her sculptures are objects a shaman of the future might create to speak of the mysteries of the universe. She enjoys the resourcefulness of working with what she can find. Each piece is a manifestation of many days of labor. This kind of devotion only happens when we love something. Jordan loves this planet and is grateful for the places where her feet touch the ground here.