[Editor’s Note: This piece is included in She Summons: Why… Goddess Feminism, Activism and Spirituality?” Volume 1 (Mago Books, 2021).]
The week before quarantine began I felt a squirrel inside me telling me to pick up seeds, art supplies, bales of soil. A storm is coming, get what you need to grow. And my head hung low because my heart knew that victims of domestic abuse would be locked in their cages. Deep deep in their cages. A thought I could not shake although I didn’t know what to do.
A month into quarantine an active shooter broke across my province; in what is now recorded as the largest mass shooting in Canada, (blatantly disregarding what the colonists did to the Indigenous people when they stole this land). As the headlines began to roll in I knew just what brand of unhinged this man was and that he has a much longer line of victims than the souls he took from the world that day.
Every other survivor and victim knew what I knew. When the headline about what a nice guy he was came through, those survivors, victims, and I knew that narcissists are master manipulators and care deeply what others think of them. We knew how charming a monster could be. I read each headline that unrolled across the internet through the eyes of hundreds of victims. I heard what the media told them about how society sees them. And when the victim blaming burned the comments section I climbed into a shell. When I shell finally cracked open the bivalves this poem/ story/spell fell out:
A Calling
she wakes in the night
to find the fear of a thousand strangers
sewn like galaxies to the fabric above her bed,
the linen sail that she and her love use to slip past the moon
the fears glitter at her
they take what’s left of the streetlamp
after the woods and the window are through
and wave it at her like golden flags in the dark
she follows the fine and pearly webbing
from each flag to its anchor,
to the spiders in their traps
sunlight flaring inside her
she casts her own threads,
whipping them out
across an aerial view of the world
out to cities of light bundles
and to souls in between
she finds them and binds the monsters
spin spin spin
the web glows
and she growls
or she hums
plucking fears
all lit up from within
she weaves in the light
she spins and she spins
capturing monsters
and tying off binds
when the monsters have all been bound
left dangling for their makers,
she retracts her eight legs
they become her eight roots
reaching down through the earth
to the flame underground,
she sends a warm glow to the spiders
then each of the spiders she
snip snip snip snips free
severs the threads left behind
the ones with the hooks
and tied off with dark binds
she unhooks and she snips
and she prunes off disease
with silk and lamplight
she patches their flags back to sails,
she sews instructions into pillows
nightly:
the dark threads must be snapped
and the hooks be unhooked
thread by thread, snip snip snip
soon the hooks will be gone
and the threads won’t grow back,
rest, heal, and then help the others
with a sigh of relief from each spirit released
she takes up the silver thread to her sail
free of fear, she climbs back to her sweet starboat bed
Jennifer Cooper: As an ecologist, my written word is a reflection of the world through a lens trained to pick up on the fine web between fine details. I live on the shore of Sydney Harbour in Nova Scotia with my children, partner, and bunnies. Delighting in anarchy, I like to transcend pigeonholes by using art and imagination to inspire scientific education and science to paint art and poetry all the while sharing my writing, artwork, and gardening with my children.