Mask
There are raccoons in my attic. The refrigerator died in the middle of the night. The smell of
burnt rubber filled the air. I awoke to a puddle of water and food slowly rotting. I am calling
people to trap animals. I am realizing my needs don’t fill up as much space as I had imagined. In
this stillness, I create. An altar for Omolu to help us heal and understand as we shelter from the
plague. Offerings of black eyed peas, shells. Cedar fills every nook and cranny of my house, on
the stove, a slow and soft simmer. There are raccoons in my attic. Then the snow came in midApril. In this stillness I face the final work to let go, the work that I thought was complete,
emerge as a final task before transformation. A friend calls and we talk for hours about white
entitlement, settler colonialism and their messy white asses not knowing their place in creation.
My beard has grown, this is how long it’s been—it’s grey, white really, and removes the
suggestion of a double chin. I write and write and write and watch documentaries and re-read
books and write. I learn how much this heart has stretched in this container we call America. I
learn how it reconfigures and shapes itself around the damage that’s been done by this system.
My foot got inflamed and I made a poultice from the cedar gifted to me from Jennifer. I know far
too many women named Jennifer. I am being carried forward through this tide of cleansing. I
move out of the way for our Motherfather to do her work. This is not the healing they talk about.
Where the grief envelops to allow love to return. Her mother has visited again and wants to
communicate. I want to hear her voice again too and feel the wind of her. All of this is happening
at once and politics isn’t enough and they keep quoting Audre and Gloria and Arundhati and
Angela yet will never allow new words to emerge from their throat bellies for our future. This is
the work of it, birth out the new or become debris during the removal.
The raccoons are gone.
M. Carmen Lane
contents of issue 12
Mask
M. Carmen Lane
M. Carmen Lane Biography
M. Carmen Lane (Tuscarora, Mohawk, African-American) is a two:spirit artist and writer
living in Cleveland, Ohio. Their poetry has been published in the Yellow Medicine Review, River
Blood & Corn and Red Ink Magazine. Carmen contributed to the Lambda Literary nominated
anthology Sovereign Erotics: A Collection of Two-Spirit Literatures. Their first collection of
poetry is Calling Out After Slaughter (2015). IG: m_crmnlne www.mcarmenlane.com
