Ash
- Ash
Today sun warms the snow. It melts and comes apart, running off in streams, cross-hatching its way downhill. Water has a destination always— home, to all other water. Standing in its path, I’m closed, a knot of grief, a stone.
I’m remembering your words: I didn’t choose this, and Now survive. I hoard my losses against the chance that more will be taken from me. I want what babies want, sustenance when I call out. I want belief to seep in and find its level in me.
I long for the things I destroyed— our home, this season’s food, small niches that might have been havens— ground I thought I’d clear by burning— even the remains, sifted, and settling over me.
Selected works by Sharan Strange:
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• First Sight
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• Hunger
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• Natural Occurrences
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• Froggy’s Class: South Carolina, 1969
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• Dorothy
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• Mule
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• February 19,1994
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• Ash
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• The Unintended Life
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• The Factory
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• The Stranger
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• The Body
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• An Interview with Sharan Strange
Sharan Strange, a member of the Dark Room Collective, teaches literature and social studies at Parkmont School, an independent non-traditional middle and high school in Washington, D.C. In 1995, she received the M.F.A. degree in creative writing from Sarah Lawrence College. She has been in residence at Yaddo, the Gell Writers’ Center, and the MacDowell Colony. Her poems have appeared in a number of periodicals and anthologies, including Agni, Black Bread, Best American Poetry, 1994 (A. R. Ammons, ed.), The Garden Thrives: Twentieth-Century African-American Poetry (Clarence Major, ed.), and Callaloo. Her poems have also been exhibited at the Whitney Museum (New York) and the Institute of Contemporary Art (Boston). She is a native of Orangeburg, South Carolina.
