We set ourselves out at dawn when there’s nothing but brinesoak’d air and heath. The least weird of our sisters takes out a green Crayola marker and colored in a burnt orange leaf this morning. The ink was too thin: too much water, not enough pigment, running black between the veins. The weirdest of our sisters clutches a stick in vicegrip. Teeth sharp as grimalkin, they sink their incisors into the softwood and slack their jaw, the branch their new upper lip, top of the face. The most neutral weird of our sisters rips clumps of heather by the purple root, threading thin, hairlike stems through the cracks in their fingernails, counting as they go. By high noon, there is a tapestry. We stage ourselves, set out at dawn to wait, when there’s nothing but brinesoak’d air and heath. Save for the chopped saltjaw wind which whips soft clothes to skin, notathing separates our bodies from the moorland’s breath as we wait for the scene to begin.
Anna Laura Falvey (she/her) is a Brooklyn-based poet and theater-maker. In 2020, she graduated from Bard College with degrees in Classics & Written Arts, with a specialty in Ancient Greek tragedy and poetry. She spent her college career blissfully hidden behind the Circulation and Reference desks at the Stevenson Library, where she worked. Anna Laura has been a teaching artist with Artists Striving to End Poverty since 2019, with Lumina Theatre Company since 2021, and will begin a teaching fellowship with ArtistYear in January of 2022. She currently works as editorial assistant at Bellevue Literary Review, the medical humanities journal based out of Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan.