Katherine DeCoste

Substratum triptych

1. Roots

I’m a lineage of misremembrances and stories told wrong. Names spelled five different ways, vowels misplaced. I’m an ancestry of mispronunciations. You tell your name to the military and they add letters for good measure, bureaucratic differentiation. We have a history of running, an ancestry cobbled together from scraps. You pull wool over your eyes and the state’s; write down a new way to dodge the draft, to find a job, to feed the family. I’m far from home and nobody can trace me back. I’m out of genealogy. Leave that to the afterlife. I’ll sit down with you and pack your pipe and we’ll talk real talk. Why you drank. Why you taught. Why you died so young. Why you didn’t leave a thing behind.

2. Bedrock

Off the peninsula, shelter ceases. The cedars bow to western winds howling like sea wolves. The waves break shells against stones, polished smooth, rolling against one another. Our footprints press deep into sand, fade out until we’ve left no trace. You ask how I can tell the tide is going out. It pulls the sand in ribbons, tugging back into itself like it’s starving. I point to the line of its devastation: logs worn smooth halfway up the beach, where sand gives way to stone. You ask when the rain will stop. For that I have no answer. We’re in the cloud, our vision fogged. Water drains. Water returns. Drowns. Erodes.

3. Subterrain

I’m an oubliette. There’s no way out of me. I’m underground darkness and a pinhole of light. You’re lowered down into me until you can’t reach the stars. Wet on stone walls, damp in your lungs. Extend your arms and you’ll chafe against the side of me. Try to sit, recline, and you’ll wedge between my walls. You’ll never move again. I’m a slow unrecorded death. I’m a return to the earth; I’m chthonian. Waste away with visions of your tomorrow: bones gnawed clean by water and time. Run your thumb over femur and rib: theirs, then yours, and I’ll shadow you in mimicry. I’ll forget you here, so help me, I will.