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Pocahontas vii.
The locals told us not much ever and refused to trade glass beads for corn or copper for wheat and we died that winter, simply and awfully. Of course we stole, lied, killed, hacked the world down to a few lines of smoke and sizzling flesh, stumbled across the frozen river hoping any live color would bloom. And felt our own skin shrivel into flakes and fragments that held sky up to sky. No wonder Smith staggered out of the woods, the name Pocahontas a whisper ripped in air.
* first and last lines taken alternately from poems in Catherine Barnett’s Into Perfect Spheres Such Holes Are Pierced and James Galvin’s X.
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