Making Kin :: In Corpore Sano Presents Petra Kuppers
Poems from artist-activist Petra Kuppers’ Moon Botany project, plus a process note and prompt
Artist and disability activist Petra Kuppers shares poems from her project and community workshop Moon Botany—a creative exchange initiated when visual artist Sharon Siskin brought Petra materials from nature that were otherwise inaccessible to her via wheelchair or cane. As a supplement to the poems, Kuppers contributes her notes on the “narrative escape routes” and other “crippy bodymindspirit stories” that the Moon Botany practice can generate, as well as a prompt for others to engage with this practice.
Expanded and additional work from Kuppers appears in the forthcoming initial print volume of In Corpore Sano.
Found on an Oregonian Playa
Barbed wire: do not walk here
if you are a cow, your hooves will puncture and swell
gush bloody pus on the desiccated land
boils explode on the grey cacti, clings on to life,
roots deep in the pores of pumice, treacherous hold,
one gust of the night wind and plants pummel across
the basin, their heads dipped into one shallow bowl
of salty sour water, a mirage, drift past already, gone,
the storm gusts you till you are spiked on farm machinery
and the lever of the long-dry pump of the old corral.
Do not walk here, in the land of light stones and ancient wire,
there is no hold fit for the hitching.
Found on the Pond Deck
The husk of a tiny dragonfly, translucent,
clings upside down on a yellow spear of grass
its roots clasp the dry wood of the deck.
Tiny white fibers everywhere: the planks, breathing,
expectorate their innards, wood weeps and uncoils
what it knew when it stood, tall in a wet Redwood forest,
before the chains of a truckbed, dark and long, bite, here,
where all trees are twisted into themselves against
the prevailing winds. On that white-spun deck,
I remember my watery nature, pour my liquid body
to wash away the pain of the shorter years,
to wash away the pain of a hollow embrace,
the feeling that we all will slide, not into the clear pool,
but into the murk of a place that should not be settled.
Found on the Walk up to the Hill Bench
I might be a horsetail fern, taciturn, very old, indeed,
a bit saggy around the brown bits, the junctures of the segments
that mark my years here in the freezing cold,
in the brutal sun. You call me sparse and elegant,
against the riotous color of the flower carpet all around.
I try to stay alive. You plucked me. Puff ball: do you
have no decorum? Wait to swell, stay around a bit,
let the fibers grow a tad, instead of toddling drunkenly,
waiting to go to seed and spill your guts,
ripe pickings for the thirsty birds or any hand that longs
to squeeze, till innards drip, and watch the world split,
explode, decay, because you can.
Found on the Other Side of the Pond
Inky cap: edible or poisonous, sat out too long in the rain.
Mantle erodes while you look, tears you can use for ink,
these are not black marks, in your book, not the liquids
deliberately mingling with your blood. If your system can’t
take transformation, desist, curl your fingers around fluffier
stuff, the cat tail’s losing it, too, melts down and pollutes
fine dander with the seedy edge. These lines are not tears.
We deliquesce, bloom out of line, without arthritic shifts,
slipstream on the pond’s edge, time alchemies lift
us into multitudes. Your marks edge deeper, compress:
matter out of place accumulates, grooves a canyon,
stiffens your mood.
Found on Mushrooming Walk
Wow, foot print sucker, very flowery chemical vein not quite in marble.
Old warm sea. Old times. Oh you are so delicate.
You cling on, don’t you, beneath the dust of meteorite bowl,
hesitant tentacle preserved and unveiled, immodest,
to the newbies, twinkle mushroom feeds on air and last night’s rain,
pinhead knows nothing of exoskeletal growing pain, rub of dust
on skin chaffed by sunburn and the wind’s whip. Stem too delicate to
be picked, a tight little cap peeks for a day at the first hungry bird
without a mushrooming book, extravagant spores ride high
out over the mountain. So, you will live.
Hitch up on boot, dust the sock, lodge yourself,
soar stuck on the windy desert rim, flat stony face.
Making Kin: Process Notes
Moon Botany is a series of poems that respond to material found on walks on the land — usually found by friends who bring me material from their explorations. As a wheelchair user who occasionally skips about with a cane, I cannot easily hike and traverse space, although I thoroughly enjoy doing so. I use a particular voice to engage my disappointment productively, to immerse myself in fantastical space, grounded in mushrooms, berries, twigs, or other emissaries from the woodlands, the salt lakes, and the prairie. Saucy-voiced pieces respond to local landscape, to stories of inclusion and exclusion around me, to living in border zones, thriving aside, despite, below, and beyond.
For one poem here, “Found on the Other Side of the Pond,” visual artist Sharon Siskin brought me mushrooms found in the alkali land surrounding the Playa Artist Residency in Oregon. The disintegrating mushrooms allowed me to use the word “deliquesce” in a poem. In the desert politics of how to nourish farm lands, how to deal with water politics and communication, mushrooms speak to survivance. Spores create visual images (my friend sketched the mushrooms around spore prints). Past, present, future look different to animalplants that create their own internet world of rhizomatic connection underground.
These are the stories I tap into in the making process of Moon Botany, my poem series, and Moon Botany, my community arts workshop: human stories, and what we unearth of non-human ones, making kin.
I am interested in the eddies that shape a momentary side-pool along the Boise River, which runs alongside my Surel’s Place artist residency home in Idaho. A male duck, decked out in shimmering green, dives head-down, ass in the air, as he searches for yummy weeds. A female duck swims nearby, mousy-colored, with intricate patterns only visible when I spend my time, hang out. She comes closer and closer to the thrashing rapids of the swollen river. My mind plays out the prison-break, jump into the white water, duck kitted out in orange safety helmet, sideways careen out of the harboring pool into the danger zone.
When I lead a Moon Botany community workshop, we focus on moments where our kin offer us narrative escape routes. The ducks and the mushrooms offer writers broad backs for narrative involvement and projection. The trick is to dive and return, to balance on the edge of swirl and calmness: leave the duck its duck-ness, the mushroom its own tempo of transformation.
Crippy bodymindspirit stories of being left behind, or being out of place, being alone or in pain, needing escape routes or just a better kind of weed: these kinds of poems can shape themselves in our Moon Botany.
Moon Botany prompt
Go where you cannot walk.
Go where there are others that you fear. The deer tick. The snake. The nettle. The thief. The cosmetic store with its chemical assault. Hover on the threshold.
Go and listen to the low-voice story, the held-back breath of a plant or a crumbly brick edge.
You cannot walk here, go back. You cannot breathe here, go back. In that space between safe and danger, feel the grass or the glass. What sings to you, what whispers, what firmly asks you to stay in your lane?
Will you comply?
Versions of “Found on the Walk up to the Hill Bench” and “Found on Mushrooming Walk” first appeared in About Place (Volume III, Issue IV: October 2015). Versions of some of these poems also appeared in Aeolian Harp Anthology: Volume 3 (2017).
Petra Kuppers (she/her) is a disability culture activist, a community performance artist, and a Professor at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She also teaches at the Low-Residency MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts at Goddard College, is the Artistic Director of an international disability performance collective, The Olimpias, and is currently a poetry fellow of the Black Earth Institute.
Petra uses somatic and speculative writing as well as performance practice to engage audiences toward more socially just and enjoyable futures. She has written academic books on disability arts and culture, medicine and performance, and community performance. Her most recent poetry collections are PearlStitch (Spuyten Duyvil, 2016) and the chapbook Green Orion Woman (dancing girl, 2018). Her book of speculative short stories, Ice Bar, appeared in 2018. Stories have appeared in journals like Anomaly, The Sycamore Review, PodCastle, The Future Fire, Capricious, Wordgathering, and Accessing the Future: A Disability-Themed Anthology of Speculative Fiction. She lives with her partner, poet and dancer Stephanie Heit, in Ypsilanti, Michigan, where they co-create Turtle Disco, a community arts space.
IN CORPORE SANO: Creative Practice and the Challenged* Body, is a transdisciplinary collection and conversation by, on, and for bodies-against-within-despite, in the form of an ongoing web series and a forthcoming print:document series (preorder a copy here!). If you’d like to be a part of ICS, rolling submissions for the project are once again open.
With thanks to managing editor and lead facilitator Elæ [Lynne DeSilva-Johnson].
