Streaming

Abstract

36 WLT MAY–AUGUST 2017 The innovator isn’t important. It’s whoever has the watershed moment. – Travis Hedge Coke We haven’t slept since September. Some of us, since we remember. Not the real sleep, the deep-down cloud dreams. We do dream encoded loaded maze of meaning, circling consciousness, streaming before we are wakeful to undo, rearrange perspective , begin seeing. It is reason, dreaming. They’re shooting people. Water is life. In another time, not long ago, I might have found you face up in a field of silence among the stillbeautiful bodies of Dakota men. To speak for the land: even our history is against us here. – Karenne Wood, “To Keep Faith” Our texts and emails, cryptic. The liminal space we dwell in, funneling channel flow to stimulate strategy, support, to manifest our way of being, use ourselves as conduits to change the onslaught we muddle through. It is the plunther we feel that feeds impetus, writing, reading, breathing. We muster each agonizing proof as colonialism chiefs its way, no matter the era. The more insidious, the more it manages to find colluders, investment stakeholders. It’s day twenty in the electoral college coup new world order. Day five, the latest colonial figurehead-led coup, executive order inked, chased time from existence, from its place protecting water from awkward penetration by drills meant to inhabit the black snake seeping toxic ssssss, the millions of years old, sometimes hundreds of millions of years old anaerobic decomposition of thunder lizard deep beyond the airless brine water walls. The tyrant’s invested. Along with seventeen banks, hundreds of entities, with hunger for power and wealth despite the health of the planet or her people. Rubber bullets, concussion grenades, water cannons, pepper spray, tasers , brute force, and psychological torture on US and Western Hemispheric Tribal Nation citizens, including journalists covering protectors praying, singing, dancing, willing to sacrifice themselves to spare clean water. This is what we’ve come to in the colonial mad world. Not a step away from Wounded Knee, Sand Creek, from Mankato, since September they’ve blown up an arm, detached a retina, bloodied, bruised, frozen, battered, imprisoned, ethnic cleansing–like numbered, all for oil, for a pipe that will eventually deteriorate and leak, ruining water forever, for millions. You can’t drink oil. Water is life. I finger pelican bones, mollusk shells, A piece of down; I cherry pick – Tiffany Midge, “Oil Spill” It is said dinosaurs, the oil plume, left the world when a pelican opened his eyes and shot lightning and his mouth thundered. They left the world when they had grown so big everything else was endangered. They had outgrown the planet and the planet needed to survive, and has. The remnants of the lizard decomposition below us now, like all else, once inhabited the ground before ice age turned it over. It is deeply seeded into earth and not meant to see light of day in this world, this time we know on earth. Its entangled and hammered spirit seeps beneath us and fills a space that would be who knows what in the mystery of the planet if this tragedy had not befallen them. It is important to not reduce dinosaurs to lizards, or we cannot from studies or definitions alone tell them apart. It is important to remember lizards lived alongside dinosaurs, that species, like writers, Streaming by Allison Adelle Hedge Coke cover feature | puterbaugh essay WORLDLIT.ORG 37 fred jones jr . museum of art , the university of oklahoma , norman ; the james t . bialac native american art collection , 2010 America Meredith (Cherokee Nation), Current (2005), acrylic on steel, 18 x 18 in, part of the Greater Vehicle series 38 WLT MAY–AUGUST 2017 are not born all on the same day with the same scope and wants and do not die all at once even in times of mass extinction. a lone whale singing at a frequency of around 52 hertz has cruised the ocean since 1992. Its calls, despite being clearly those of a baleen, do not match those of any known species of whale, – Deborah Miranda, “Ishi at Large” Alongside Big Sioux River, a Missouri tributary, at the site...