by Bec Bell-Gurwitz

Jordan Tierney, *Ceremony of Souls*, window sash, deer bones, beads, wire, metal, broken china, rosary, plastic snake, all found in urban streams, photo, plywood, paint, 26 x 20 inches, 2019. Courtesy of the artist.

Three Lessons in Grief

Bec Bell-GURWITZ | JUNE 2023 | Issue 24

Upbringing

The first lesson was how to keep things alive,
how to water the plants, to raise silk
the class caterpillars died a slow protracted death,
left their silk behind
this is how I learned we are
what we make

On a family trip I didn’t want to face depths or
ride listless burros,
anything that could take me down

I always wanted more than I could get—
wanted to want not to suffer
a pen in my grip or a hand in it

This is how I kept it all
a moth collecting dust,
finger of whiskey fluttering
in and out,
keeping me hungry.

My house was old my house was a lesson in dying
I doused and thumbed the days
calendar white in their squares,
Dawn washed the birds of
oil spills and ocean trash

I washed my knees at the end of the day,
two solid angels
I cried without showing teeth, sat on the stoop
picking up rocks then letting them go,
my favorites, especially, I let go.

Lidice

I.

What about poppies?
she said
fields of
red we stand in for

the sun carries
time
and seedlings do the
telling

she needed to
see it:
the children
separated—
kneeling in
a shallow basin
taking cover

June swallows,
reflects poppies into
child faces,
gathered statues

II.

What is
the name
of a color
that watches sky
and lets it pass under
breathing
anew?

She plants careful
poppies

fed under
ground
under
violence

her knees bent
in the braying dirt

III.

red was the color of
many things—

mouths of
a field
calling out
for mama

a child’s cheek
shot through
with copper

Mourning Practice

you don’t know grief,
don’t know what to do with
the animal.
leather ears eyes full
Silent herds, eyes full
good enough
guide

Calvary Cemetery washes back
under Kosciuszko
mournings

I practiced my high dive
animal habit prey drive

windows moving light
slatted
pushing water with my hands,
dark deep blue lines dividing

or in Oregon the wind-made river
brought violence
in caps

Blowing restless cliffs torso
weighted, or weightless,
white wind,
freckles and sand clinging
to wet skin

How do you collect
each soft body?

Half submerged limbs
water ghost dangle kick ripples,
fat ripples soft
share lanes,
divide come close,
brush hands, come close

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.