Moonlight and Moonshine

By Shantell Powell

​We waited until the moon was still.
Drilled a hole into the dark side of her lid
and threaded her through with copper tubing.
 
The heavens watched, and we bided
time in the sea of tranquillity,
waiting for corn crops to ripen and
sugarcane to bulge with sweetness.
 
Evading teetotallers, we harvest
under the cover of new moon night,
when our sleeping satellite still is no more
than a silver thread in the stellar sky.
Our moonshine is the life of many a party.
We dress our feet in star-shaped shoes
to disguise our trail through the Milky Way.
No one will find us here.
 
We distil the light of luna ‘til
it burns like the sun and makes
speakeasies glow like the moon.
We gambol through the galaxy,
drunk on moonlight and ethanol. 

---

In Me

By Shantell Powell

​Soft and jittery a
caterwauling caterpillar
legs erupting with seizure.
 
My crone tongue and teeth fuzzy as
vocal distortion torsion distortion
softly encrusted with the debris
of sweetness.
 
Tooth decay smells like death,
tastes like your own mouth
rots in an acid of your own creation.
 
With the tongue in groove comes
palate scraping scalping palate cleansing flensing
swing from epiglottis like Tarzan on his vine
and hope for no gag reflexively falling
down deep throat down down like soft feathers
in a no quill shelter
 
Come wave after wave of cilia,
arms of a sea anemone
Reaching
                        Clutching
                                                Feeding
                                                                        Living
on krill and microorganisms and burping yeast, yet
Dependent upon death.
 
All of this is part of the macro-organism that is us.
You young and me old,
a collection of organisms,
like jellyfish or lichen,
part of the even larger organism that is
whirled world.
 
Drone down.
 
We, all meat, all meet.

---

In the Beginning

By Shantell Powell

​Cradled in my father’s arms
His swarthy skin taut, his black hair ungreyed.
I haven't even learned to walk yet.
I reach tiny hand to enormous nose
To grasp at hair growing within the twin caves of nostrils.
“No, no,” he says, and pushes my hand away.
 
In a trailer park.
Vertical stripes of fake wooden panelling,
White ceiling and white floor.
The mobile home is new and so am I.
I don’t know this
Is the youngest I'll remember him.
 
My memory is in the 70s,
and he is in his 70s, too.

---

Survival

By Shantell Powell

​Dad was ex-military.
A hunter and lobster fisherman.
He shot a moose.
My uncle poached fingerling salmon.
Some neighbours raised rabbits and knew mushrooms.
Another plowed potato fields with his team of oxen.
One raised sheep and gave us mutton
tasting and smelling of wet wool.
Another fed his Jersey and Holstein cows turnips.
Sold the cream at market price, but gave us the milk.
It was fine for baking, but
turnip-flavoured corn flakes defeated me.
Because city slickers shot his cows during deer season
he started painting them orange.
 
The WWII vet next door shot whitetail deer and black bears.
With steady hand and leveled rifle,
he drove off the neighbour who shot his dog through the cheek
and whose children’s backs were ridged with whip scars.
I sometimes wonder if that was the man
who burnt our house down years later.
 
Us kids fished for trout, tommy cod, and pollock,
roamed the beach for clams, snails, crabs, and razorfish,
picked wild rose hips, chokecherries, wild apples, berries.
Got yelled at when we ate all the berries instead of bringing them home.
 
The moms did a lot of canning.
Canned moose.
Canned mussels.
Canned jam.
Canned jelly.
Canned pickles.
We traded with one another so we wouldn’t have to eat the same thing all the time.
We gleaned commercial farms after the harvest,
filled our larders with what had been overlooked.
 
In the spring, I plucked tips off spruce trees,
because those make jelly, too.
We picked teeth with pine needles.
Chewed sap from black spruce.
Harvested cedar fronds for tea,
but knew better than to drink it too often.
Plucked downy-bottomed Labrador tea leaves
for when we had fevers.
Daubed black mud from beneath the alders
onto bee stings and mosquito bites.
Sometimes I found milky-eyed
animals abandoned by poachers.
 
When we weren’t working, us kids ran wild.
Tracked deer. Climbed trees. Caught crayfish.
Hid the barn kittens.
Trespassed in the neighbour’s secret field.
Had apple fights in the woods and returned
with black eyes, split lips, and loose teeth.
Played frisbee with dried cow pies.
Had summer snowball fights with horse shit.
We got really good at dodging.
On Fridays we watched a small plane
drop a little parachute into the secret field.
Then a rusty old Chevy retrieved
Escobar cartel cocaine.
 
Us kids wandered the roads picking
up all the beer bottles and beer cans,
pop bottles and pop cans.
and filled our little red wagon.
Didn’t tell our parents that when we cashed them in
we spent most of it on candy.
We ate candy until we were sick.
 
Mom sewed and mended clothes.
My grandmother knitted mittens
gunner-style for shooting or for wielding chainsaws.
They cooked meal after meal on a woodstove.
Baked bread every week.
Babies sucked from whoever was lactating.
Older kids babysat younger kids
and didn’t always do a good job because we fought.
That earned all of us spankings.
 
We got the belt when we were bad
and then were told not to cry.
We waved at the planes spraying us with DDT.
We developed lung disease.
 
Sometimes, when Dad was in the bush,
hunters sprayed the woods with bullets
and he had to lay low and kitten crawl
like when he was serving overseas.
At night, when lost poachers fired frantic shots,
we ignored them and ate our supper.
 
Late winter, early spring,
Dad tapped maple trees
boiled the sap for days on end.
It takes 40 gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup.
 
Dad sharpened tools on a grindstone.
Scythed tall grass into hay.
Oiled guns.
Trimmed hooves.
Forged shoes and shod horses.
Killed kittens.
Built a root cellar out of rocks
and a septic tank from a busted deep freezer.
 
He set up a snare line,
brought back winter white hares.
Skinned, they looked like dead babies.
Told us that when he was our age,
he and his brother fought over who got to eat the eyes.
They called them jewels in caves.
 
We crawled through potato fields
filling baskets to dump into barrels.
The wage was a buck a barrel.
Though I worked for hours,
I was too slow to ever earn a dollar.
I peeled countless potatoes with a paring knife.
My family went through ten pounds each day.
 
Fed and watered and wormed the animals.
Picked rocks from hooves.
Milked the goats.
Lanced boils.
Tended fires.
Checked and repaired fences.
Shoveled shit.
Weeded gardens.
Did our homework.
Fled from the rooster.
Collected eggs every day.
Cleaned and candled them.
Sold them to teachers at school.
Cried when a coyote ate the hind legs off our little dog.
Dad shot the coyote then shot the dog.
 
Dad slaughtered the chickens with an axe,
holding them down so their bodies wouldn’t run off.
Fearless survivors fought over flockmates’
gaping, blinking chopped-off heads.
Us kids dipped dead birds in boiling water.
Plucked them. Gutted them.
Chased one another with bladders like squirt guns.
Pulled tendons to make severed feet grab one another.
 
We mushed the dog team through snow-hushed forest
to iced-over Dorn Lake.
Boiled tea in a billy in the bush
and baked bannock on sticks.
Loaded the sled with sawed-up deadfalls
and this kept us warm.
 
Picked capelin off the beach during the spawn.
Salted and left them out to dry
until their silver eyes looked like bent, tarnished coins.
I chewed their tough meat, bones,
fins, tails and all, and loved it.
 
Sometimes we listened to yellow-fingered
drunk war veterans in a smoke-filled living room.
Tales of being strafed by enemy fire
until rumbling Spitfires shot down Nazi planes.
Of catching malaria in the Pacific theatre.
Of soldiers’ heads shot off
and how their bodies kept on running.
 
When the men wept we were chased away
and told not to come back until tomorrow.

---

​Shantell Powell is an elder goth and swamp hag raised in an apocalyptic cult on the land and off the grid. A Brave New Weird winner and an Aurora award finalist, she’s a graduate of the Writers’ Studio at Simon Fraser University, the LGBTQ+ novel immersive at GrubStreet, and the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity’s horror residency. Her writing is in Augur, The Deadlands, Nightmare, and dozens more. When she’s not writing or making things, she wrangles chinchillas and gets filthy in the woods.