re·memory Al Andalus
with no evidence to the contrary we haul directionless in time that exists within time making another truth poeming inserting she_I into history as a homunculus in the wake of Hitler’s ghost righteousness binds time soma nostalgia claims competing resources disappear and reappear in unlikely conjunctions always with bodies marked and marking a body other
from Puerta del Sol arms radiate to the now borders marking the geographic city centre geographic centre of Spain where Franco fueled torture chambers bear nibbles high bush bronze berries madroño who knew that strawberries grew on trees though it is certain bears would like them where revellers gather to mark the new year swallowing a grape to each strike between rare silences in the square
she_I might have huddled in the women’s balcony penitents entering below or behind an arch baking bread while rats chewed through penitents’ innards or in the sacristy daring to caress a luscious vestment or fancifully smoothing a transparent always a body precarious in private or public
commemoration without bodies Sefard memories without survivors perhaps revivors edge to knowing without understanding six centuries of forgetting she_I hears strains of live violin and bass weaving Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah into the renovated christian conquest gates
searching for place in Toledo where absence occupies space blood susurrs the bowl of the Roman bath resonates between jasper columns pulses from the leather suitcase of the medieval merchant traveller commemorated in early 21 Century brass plaques lain without spell check conquest memorialized
conquest from the south begets recycled Roman columns bracing the mesquita arches for the fugitive prince more conquest warriors now from the north propel major recycling rich families a bell tower on top of the minaret holy water beget the catedral refined by the monstrance gold on a silver palaver from conquest perhaps Guanajuato where the alter overlooking the last mine is indeterminate wood
Carlos V begins the palace for his one love who dies his gardeners and engineers decamp resisting raised taxes leaving a shell and the Alhambra to be reimagined 300 years later by victorian adventurers we all hold a slice not big enough to support our grand vision without expertise witness the failure amid the grandeur
led underground into a parking garage she_I peers behind a Prius through a rectangle of dim glass at vestigial graves excavated by accident bewildering the city not like Oka where the tanks came out for a golf course or Burnaby pipelines through sacred grounds but this accident reveals unlayers cemeteries carbon-dated to the 13th through 15th centuries when jews lived in Sevilla when churches and synagogues first occupied mosques and remains languish in museums bedeviling the authorities
The other comes through the cracks where rain and exhaust and mold challenge material history at the grim margins exposing the aron kodesh and moorish arches under the baroque plaster fallen away against delicate questions generating answers manifest about which slice to restore in Sevilla
landing in the Indies from a zeitgeist of persecution and intolerance Columbus took possession of all of them for our most fortunate King by making public proclamation and unfurling his standard, no one making any resistance penning this harbinger while sailing dispatching his triumph to Ferdinand and Isabella glory replicate
conquering grifters in righteous disguise overran their surround disbelief obstacled resistance belief in reason in plurality succumbed paraded under fuego repolto flames adorning the penitents’ capes under hooves memorialized on crests lynching fixed in photographs leak to algorithms driving hazing hate weaponized hybridity libeled
probing La Convivencia while Neo-Nazis march against Jews in Whitefish Montana remembering a random skier on a lift there 20 years ago declaring he preferred skiing in the Kootenays because it was more European maybe while she-I slept a timeframe for turning a community against its own neighbours emerged or a bellwether resistance is arising….just checking … the wether was a castrated sheep who led the flock
child of the unsettlers who claimed empty lands with empty pockets empty bellies grasps history poorly
grasps cartography rule by surveyors mapping empty quarter section by section by township gradually winds
a mind backward when now is incomprehensible and tribal warfare explanations fail writing fraught without history
without entering she_I in
filling Station Magazine is a literary and arts magazine publishing innovative poetry, fiction, non-fiction (creative non-fiction, reviews, articles, interviews, live event reviews, photo essays, etc), and presenting a featured visual artist each issue.
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