Essays: “A Recipe! Archive Work.” by rachel j. atakpa
A Recipe!
Archive Work.
What happens when you go seeking?
***
I lie on my back to look at stars, on my belly to look at bugs. Organ to ground, heart to sky. This time’s tilt, moon-toward and rippling. Waves, cycles, and tides, stark and augmented. Erosion slides over stones, winnows infrastructure, hearkens the winds. The first thing I learn to sew is a quilt then an apron/to sow is forget-me-nots and then okra.
***
Sometimes the waves are like snow blanket or torrential veil, falling to our knees, the water. This is the time where by wind, leaves become rain, seeds fly like migrating birds, and storms pool at the outskirts of drought. The land cracks and slides “No Trace” an illusory imperviousness.
***
Walking in the neighborhood, there are broken blue bottles, mattresses gutted and strewn. The plains tumble beneath me; I mostly see them in way stations or parking lots, excavation sites—altered; by grief and gravity—I see my body preoccupied.
***
Ephemeral siluetas shadow the earthen, etheric, and ancestral. They leave impressions. Another animal, being here, playing between gravity’s weight and erosion’s temporality. Anna Mendieta lays, carves, ignites her supine body into elemental memory—ice, blood, fire, stone, flower. Mendieta calls her work, magic—befriends archetypes, heeds spirit, gathers ceremony.
***
When Alice Walker stood hip-deep in cemetery weeds and called out “Zora!,” Hurston called back through a beetle and brought her to her resting place. How many guides companioned Walker to the gravesite; folktales and townsfolk, letters and writings, antennae and oyster knives? What is revealed and revived when we call upon the gifts that brought us here?
***
I surrender to grief and gravity and find myself a compost pile, warm and stinking, irregular and softening. I am along the pipelines, roots, wires, seepage, and decomposed, acutely aware of our density. The syncopation makes me catch a different drum/desire. Worms writhe and fungi blossom in their essence.
***
Desire, the pull, to compose, flow and follow the pulse of possibility into matter. To comb the eventualities of seeds—their fruits, forebears, and failures. To carry kindling in a horn, braid a raft, and call for what we have lost, what we are given.
***
About rachel j. atakpa
rachel j. atakpa is and changes. a working class, Nigerian poet, rae’s work is concerned with transgressive black aesthetics, ontological fugitivity, animist theologies, and historical materialism. atakpa’s debut chapbook, FITS: a biomythography won the Poetry Society of America’s Anna Rabinowitz award (2024). rae’s writing appears in fifth wheel press, Contemporary Verse 2, Berkeley Poetry Review, and elsewhere; rae’s art has been exhibited at Charlotte Street Foundation, KCAI Artspace, and the Lawrence Arts Center. a liver in afterlives and seer between seas, atakpa’s practice is of the web: iridescent, ecosomatic spacecraft.
instagram: @atakpa.site
website: atakpa.cargo.site