A few pages from “Settlement” by Christine Stewart

A few pages from “Settlement”

Using the word ghost is good because that’s what the old people say when they talk about white people in this country: “Ghosts trying to find their clothes.”

M. Campbell, The Book of Jessica

Homuncolonial

D. Trujillo Lusk, Ogress Oblige

I lie here while

Flies assume

I’m fruit

Outside wealth

Imputes in trees

Draws over

Footage in house-swells

The rate of real estate

While in which I am smaller

But just as smug

A mid drift of sentient pretension

The riverfloor over soaks

 In shit, a scorched beauty

With few sturgeons

To swim to

We “can’t see the figures for the desecration”[1]

I only think when I am sick

River beds down a dark suit

Soil silt of soil alluvial

Rich and aluminum

Apprehension of several

Millennia

Here dream-time fracks a white frame

And neighbourhood committees

But I vies diminutive and

Plies more gain for these little man-like killers.

(wot we must! pop sum)

Consummate convicts

Of no existence

Reduced to forgery

Forget awry

Froth in every silvery aside

(sobbing camouflage)

My transience gives me settlement, makes

You nomadic this logic bleats with literal addictions

Slips of best trick sets me generic against

Your specific special interest

Thus, I am biped anonymous

Wry my engorgement, oh boy

A manly potentate

As such ‘I’m here’ is heard as a discouraging lurch

Scoring a tepid trend history proves it

A whole fistful of phantoms

Terra nullius felonius 

[the abyss (mal) myths us]

Due West aces/acres

Up (en blanc) as I’m one trumped up tale

Of wilderness a just blank

Ur Plains [fur North]

Where Hot sir[2] burns up land tracks

Amputates animals with stamina

The chassis of subject here

Equals white will you

Plus phantom won’t you

Thus ghostly endeavors

 Demeanors stores [boxed]

And stories

Never you mind

Nether bents bored sack

He sings and means the production of real states

War-wear

Community standards affiliate and public

Heads back up in manly panders

You may mark

The exact and stain of it

Usufruct usurped as

Out-back points up fact

Of tar sands sucking up

Ducks in present gasps of circumstance

Moreover therein sacks

My nationhood’s bid for swag

Deplorable adorable

“But consider” the redactor

Much of the hideousness I embody is properly

Private for land scales soar

Stabs of circumstantial justice

Be plied portion my land section

Here’s my money; here’s my mouth

 But “the land here hears Blackfoot and Cree”[3]

Wherein, might this English miss it, grasping circumference, misty, hamfisted?

Idyllic begetter of nominal dolt oaf

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[1] D. Trujillo Lusk Ogress Oblige

[2] i.e. Frank Oliver

[3] D. Donald on the North Saskatchewan River March 13, 2012

 Christine Stewart works in experimental poetics and creative research in the English and Film Department at the University of Alberta and the Learning Centre in Boyle Community Services, downtown Edmonton, Alberta. This selection from “Settlement” is new work from the Underbridge Project. Forthcoming books: Virtualis: Topologies of the Unreal with BookThug and The Humanist with Red Nettle Press.