Live to tell

 

Length: 0:41

 

Jackie speaks while her hand, in front of an old and gnarled tree trunk, holds up a handful of dirt and, in slow motion, lets it sift through her fingers. She says:

 

To knuckle my hands into soil, to clutch at

Smooth glass from an old wound,

a root,

a bulb,

a rock,

a worm.

This mud digs under my nails, half-watered.

Live to tell. This glass, a cut into my arm. A rock, a memory of stubbornness. You were born angry, says my mother. I brought you home with a scab on your nose that you got from scraping it on the sheet, no, no, no.