August 2012 Archives

By Natasha Gold

I meet grey sky with muscles and blood, hot breath exploding
not like clouds not like soft pockets of air but the earth opening
the earth expelling secrets heavy with sweat and ocean, the same salt
binding two to atmosphere and ozone, the trampled sky
the earth panting, i do i do i do

the wind that keeps me moving the wind that keeps me alive
the sweat barking up my spine chasing my back
the drum of my legs shouting, keeping my hands below
my heart circling, i give i give i give

I gasp for air and know what blood on the inside feels like
rushing from the heart knowing no longer breathing, your full circle completed
spilling air now like baskets of laundry, the clean tumble of white clutching
the wind in a small fist telling god, it is it is it is

the descent slower, less manic, grey turning to clouded sun,
one last wooden step in the manmade case of two hundred and fifty,
the small bare things that keep us alive.

Image source: flickr

By: Natasha Gold

Hospitals are bad mad sad I'm god or I used to be - did you quit or were you fired? from the inside, I found airplanes on the inside their engines roaring in my head the same way another person would write about a lover being on the inside, filling their spaces with important things like skin, blood well that's not what I had I had a fullness of noise of invisible things to the human eye, explosion guts in my mouth my hand could touch so many things but I'm shy, the pulse mixes with the blood

By: Natasha Gold


These patient hunger-feeding wolves how did you know my love for the blood how it makes me shiver
                      

god       it felt good just knowing how much I could satisfy

That dry thirst in your mouth.

Remember how easily I slept when I let my ribs collapse on you when I fell bone to bone against you and

you took the first bite from my neck while I slept and you gave me a knife just to cut you and I trembled and

you grinned remember how much you loved that? I am taking it back that white winter so delicate on your

teeth it felt like the pulse of a small animal white so obvious against red I smelled you coming

The cold warmth of a wolf tail curled waiting to make love.

The Tiger a True Story of Vengeance and Survival. John Vaillant. Toronto, Vintage Canada, 2011. 329pp.
Reviewed by Line Brisebois, June 15, 2012.
 
John Vaillant is a journalist and freelance writer whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, National Geographic, and Outside, among others.(1) He was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts and now lives in British Columbia, Canada. He won Canada's Governor's General award for non-fiction in 2005 with his first book, The Golden Spruce. The author first heard about the documentary Conflict Tiger by Sasha Snow at a film festival where he was also presenting. He found the subject so compelling that he immediately engaged in research, reading "a lot about how tigers hunt fight and kill"(2), and traveled to Russia's far-eastern region as soon as he got the required authorizations in order to write his most recent book, The Tiger.

In addition to observing tigers in man-made habitats, Vaillant traveled to Russia to research his subject. He interviewed the individuals who were involved in the story, visited the crime scenes and viewed video footage that was taken during the investigation, putting his journalistic skills to work on this non-fiction work. Vaillant is interested in the conflicting forces  that oppose nature.

By using the examples of an Amur Tiger turned man-eater and the dire existence of Vladimir Markov following Perestroika, Vaillant takes us on the tiger's journey of death and vengeance through the plight of Russian tiger tracker and investigator Yuri Trush.  Products that will increase one's potency, elixirs that will enhance men's virility, mystical good-luck charms, bigger and faster cars, waterfront properties, snakeskin handbags, unborn tiger cubs skin robes: how far will rich men's appetite for nature's unique and uncommon treasures (Vaillant, 300) on the one hand, and poor men's destitution on the other, take us?   Vaillant reminds us that society's failure to provide viable habitat for both man and tiger is threatening the survival of both species.