things to do if you are the air
Poem - by Sarah Berti
Be invisible.
Secretly infiltrate the inner branches
of a gazelle's alveoli so it leaps from
grassland to sky.
Tickle the tree-leaves just enough
so they shiver with delight.
Kite-play with the kid at recess.
Unite the hot and cold aspects
of yourself to genesize
a really bad-ass thunderstorm.
Investigate lung capacities:
Take all ten sextillion atoms
required for an average breath
and voyage through the trachea
of a girl while she's about to recite
a spoken word poem to her classmates.
Enter through her nostril, inflate the lung,
and in the mouth, play with the tongue.
Caress the larynx to create sound.
As you exit via her lips,
handle her voice to shape
the flow of ferocious air,
so that after she enchants
like a wordwych whispering wind,
her classmates will have heard
the perfect Word
that you became.
Then, twenty thousand times a day,
penetrate another body via the breath.
Visit all seven billion humans on earth.
Enter every species in every biosphere.
Circulate yourself until
every breath we inhale contains a quadrillion
atoms shared by every other human and
creature not only now,
but through all of time.
Be our wind-songs, divulge our stories,
tell the tales of the untold through
our trembling mouth-pieces,
all the while having known all of us
all the while having united all of us
without our knowing.
Be invisible. Do not speak.
Let us speak you.
Sarah Berti
things to do if you are the air, poem, Issue 56/57, Winter 2021
Sarah Berti is a mythmaker, editor, ghostwriter, and former director of Mulmur Hills Camp. She is the founder of Bright Leaf Literary and the author of the forthcoming Helix Library Mythos. Trained in outdoor and experiential education at Queen's University, Sarah has worked with neurodivergent populations at summer camps where the focus was the intersection of games, storytelling, and the wilderness of the Real. Her recent poetry has been published in Reliquiae Journal, RIC Journal, Mythic Circle, and Luna Arcana. She can be found in her off-grid sanctuary in the precambrian wilderness of Ontario, Canada, under the stars. You can connect with her via @elfhood_ on twitter or at her websites: thehelixlibrary.com and brightleafliterary.com.
Get to know Sarah...
Birthdate?
February 1
When did you start writing?
When the lunar body was in Scorpio and the moon mares galloped past my open window at the witching hour. (About age seven).
Why do you write?
To create new perceptions of Reality and open new wings in the Library of the Mind.
Why do you write Science Fiction and/or Fantasy?
I try to write the Real and these genres seem to allow for the exploration of what realities, truths, and possibilities exist under the Masks Of Things.
Who is your favorite author? Your favorite story?
Impossible to answer. Some beloved authors include: David Mitchell, Jorge Luis Borges, C.S Lewis, Guy Gavriel Kay, Sean Kane, Alan Garner, Robin McKinley, and Madeleine L'Engle. Randomly chosen, two recent stories I adored were "The Secret Horses of Briar Hill" by Megan Shepherd and "Piranesi" by Susanna Clarke.
What are you trying to say with your fiction?
Living in the wilderness of the Real, I sense my neurodivergence has offered unique relationships with other-than-human intelligences. In not all but in some of my work I attempt to represent their voices in writing that is true to their natural polyphony – not to co-opt them but to show they engage in a common reasoning and affect fundamental to sentient life.
Do you blog?
Not regularly, but on the new moon in Aquarius, when the Coyotes sing, or after the Raven Travels across the Seventh Direction, you may find new material at thehelixlibrary.com