Unseen, Unstuck, A Poem traveling with Open AIR's Co-Flourish Exhibition

This plaque accompanies my tobacco tin poem, pictured below:

Open me. Hello, yes—tobacco tin speaking! Touch me, don't be shy. Open my lid and choose your very own piece of my curlicued insides. I hold snippets of a poem written for and about the Moon-Randolph Homestead, one of Open AIR's residency sites. Pick a scroll, pluck it out, and tuck it in your pocket. Scan the QR Code. With it, you can find the full poem, its yet-unfolding evolutions, and how to add your voice. I hope you'll write your own poem inspired by your scroll or this exhibit at large and submit it there.

Here's the full poem, which is also a scavenger hunt that will lead the reader to my favorite places at the Moon-Randolph Homestead, where I completed my Artist Residency with Open AIR:

Orchard brome spits seeds like men gnawing sunflower shuck,
waiting for a fish to snag the line,
With all that blood of body, you’re an ocean on the move,
Subterranean swells of water lurk beneath the apple trees,
McIntosh, Duchess, Winesap
To tell the apples apart you have to bite down, slip in, smack, chew.

Flash of iridescent wing, dragonfly, another blue body,
you’ll know Bill’s rhubarb by its tufted heights.
His father was an inventor but you saw that already,
it’s written in the knuckles of rust all over,
the gears kicking out of the earth.
Pieced together they’d form a churning belly.

Feel that coal mine yawn at your back,
Little Phoebe languid, now, yet
open her mouth and watch her make a mockery of light.

If I asked you to map her tendriling body or all that junk the box elders eat,
what would make you set pen to paper?

Right here a snake slipped from overturned oven to apple tree,
a hot thing.

In this room, I am always aware of where the miner’s empty hat sits.
It has a haunt of gasoline carried on skull by a man whose silhouette strikes a match,
how telling and terrible it is that cave is both a verb and a noun.
Make three lefts and a right and the beer’s ice cold,
If thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out,
or better yet, carve it out with glass twice stained.
A path through Hellsgate once passed just north of here,
travelers could drink from the spring in the gully past the chicken coop,

until 160 acres of Séliš-Ql̓ispe homeland cost 5 years, $22, and a promise to “cultivate.”
The spring has gone bone dry.

In the orchard, a precise harmony of dappled shadow struts its stuff,
morphing into unreplicable moments.
In the hollows, woodpeckers flex their dinosaur feathers.
If time has a face it’s the lichen swathed bark of these fruit bearing trees,
a world of interlacing caverns like heat cracked mud.
Lay it down before the bed frame gates and sleep,
pitch your fears into the pig pen, they’ll eat anything.

In the old house, suspenders dangle on their hook,
waiting for some body long gone who left a collection of butterflies.
Their abdomens pinned by needle to plank of wood,
their flightless wings ghosts of a death that came as a cleave,
flames nearly swallowed up the Homestead once, ghost wings and all.

They say a dog ran across the root cellar and fell right through the ceiling without opposable thumbs to open the mason jars,
sealed up mysteries congeal and purple still, by whose hand?
How often do preserves outlive their preserver?
Don’t answer that.
I’m fighting the urge to pull open these frameless doors,
Grip that cool porcelain slick of knob and yank.
There’s a gable on the Randolph House that opens to nothing but a nasty fall,
feel the soft bed of that magpie nest by the window,
say rootlets with me.
Death is a trickster, too.

The more I fear this virus, the more I fear I’ll fall down a manhole, drown in my shower, choke on a cherry pit.
Listen, sit. Press ear to tunnel and tell me the spookiest thing you ever saw.
Here I hear last year and the year before and before,
spiraling toward yesterday, yonder, yesteryear, fourscore and seven,
multiplying like rabbits at your feet,
their white tails recede in brilliant streaks,
cutting clean lines where all is porous.
Close your eyes into the sound of yourself moving back, back, back
silent unfurling,
unseen and unstuck.

Here's where you can find Co-Flourish:

1. Schoolhouse History & Art Center, Colstrip MT
August 1 – September 16, 2022

2. MonDak Heritage Center, Sidney MT
February 1 – April 1, 2023

3. Hockaday Art Museum, Kalispell MT
September 27 – December 16, 2023

4. Holter Museum of Art, Helena MT
January 5 - March 24, 2024