LORRIE/IF SHE WERE HERE
By Kaitlyn Purcell
Art by Michelle Campos Castillo
My whole life my whole spirit has been such a struggle of recognition historically sought to transcend with a family I could not stand to be with. There was anti-colonial nationalism that emerged deep down. I didn’t even know that this sadness was around. This structure was once primarily reinforced by piss. To blame the cycle of pain—I became a drug addict. I was around the genocidal exclusion and assimilation of getting high and feeling worthless. I still cry at night. These seemingly more reconciliatory sets of discourses—my past, my survival, but most of all, I’m torn between recognition and accommodation. I need a home and my art. Marx’s history is healing the hurt that allows me to see a host of colonial-like stars living free. So just to believe in myself and feel the worth of conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder lost the blossoms beneath the footprints. I supposedly walk in more authentic experiences than others because here we all are. We don’t lose—we only misspell ideas. Ideas that have their own kind of powerful clouds. Clouds of labyrinths that hold out doubt anyone in the NDN world remembers who you once were. My satisfaction can never actually be apprehended. I know the innocent untainted community ideas and prevalent theory, to some valley on the grey sidelines. Of violet ideas that forcefully opened up what were once collectively lost blossoms beneath the footprints of dispossession and enclosure.
The existence of power and its abuses hold out the despair, hold out the anger, dig deep to define experiences as interpretations of some refraction. I apologize for my dullness. I apologize to myself. This bothers me—these differences and my cuntainted. Feel the fragments fall about I watch unsatisfied. What to do to remedy this? I am unsatisfied when the cool brush of love lays down and life-affirming scholarship ever opening its violet lips leaving their scent all over the bed as I fall asleep. We are already poisoned enough by hatred until we meet.
Nothing will satisfy the Good Road. Somewhere eroticism and sexuality are the very means of darkness moved throughout these years. Someday all the hurt people might have their own insights in order to attract them to its wounds, and our violence feeds the empathetic imagination in this enigma of life. In my war poetry I argue that love is breathing alone, behind all the ruins, and I hope that her love can transform us. Across her mouth, a slow view of her body. The music plays for a love that is critically engaged on rooted land, but it sits on another couch. Another girl walks out of the dark. Her participatory thinking grounds itself in the music as it gets louder, and everything is abstract in the background.
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Kaitlyn Purcell is a Denesuline (Smith’s Landing First Nation) writer/artist and member of the Writing Revolution in Place creative research collective (University of Alberta). Currently, she is an English PhD student within creative and critical Indigenous studies at the University of Calgary. Her research centers arts and literature as theoretical practice exploring gender/sexuality and multi-modal creative productions (creative writing, visual, digital, and installation arts) as praxis towards healing and resistance. Her debut novella, ʔbédayine, was selected by guest judges CA Conrad and Anne Boyer as the winner of the 2018 Metatron Prize for Emerging Authors and was published Fall 2019.