Late Empire by Lisa Olstein

Author:Lisa Olstein [Olstein, Lisa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
Published: 2017-10-27T00:00:00+00:00

To get on with the business of making a life, my body put up stores as if for a long winter. It changed me, Whistle, as it should, and still I keep the evidence close. The chemical composition of human milk is case-specific, sugars and fats, proteins tailored to the moment at hand and the mouth. The temperature of the human chest, if it is a mother’s with her infant upon it, will rise or fall by as many as ten degrees as required for regulation. A young nursing mother once kept seven men and one baby alive with her milk for three weeks on a broken raft on the skin of the sea, a journey of hope gone awry and in the end they did endure a kind of safe passage to the dreamed-of shore from which they were promptly sent back. Safe passage is what we hope for and what we call a journey we survive. Passing we reserve for the dying, passed for the newly dead whom we wish safe passage to we don’t know where. If we all painted our rooftops white, my friend says, it would be like erasing an entire year’s harm. In the mind of a think tank lives the idea of a highway that powers the cars that drive it. The oldest maps are small wooden sculptures, Whistle, hand-carved, hand-smoothed, nut-brown, palm-sized replicas of the islands they describe from a distance of sea. The way they work is from something like a skin kayak or a dugout canoe, by turns you gaze out at the mist-veiled land rising across the waves and at its mirror in your hand and safely choose where to go or remember how to return.

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