Six Poems from Frayer
— Andrew Sargus Klein
What is billed as six poems by Marie-Andree Gill reads like a rock broken into six pieces. They’re formed from the same magmas, they have the same veins and chemistries, but they are dissimilar in shape and image and weight. They are together and they are not, and even if fitted back together you would still see the lines of fissure.
There isn’t much context, but there is community here—“we cut our teeth on weaponry”; “women embroider / your future on moccasins sold / to tourists”; “we have hundreds of years / of cataclysm ahead.” It is a community of survival, though the poems aren’t about helplessness; they reflect the world around them. A world that has eradicated countless indigenous peoples, to the point where there are fewer and fewer pieces left to join together.
A difficult internal and external landscape remains: “the sun fuck[s] with the lake”; “it’s time to sober up / from the thirst for certain waters”; “the raptors waiting to devour / the future.” Without titles, the poems lie on the page like they’ve always been there, like you’ll pass them by on the ground and keep walking and they’ll continue to lie there for hundreds of years, slowly breaking down, becoming sand.