For Far Too Long.

Somewhere,
in a place not unlike this one,
stories are only told with happy endings.

Terrible things do happen,
but the screams are always silenced
before they hit the air
and every time a story is swallowed
under the vigil of night

a new cloud is added to the sky.

The women here know these stories
by heart.

Sometimes,
they’ll trade whisper
behind closed doors,
but more often than sometimes
the stories are never told.
And even if we’ve never heard it spoken,
we all know the story
of a woman whose scream
was tied around her throat
like a noose.
And every time a story is swallowed
or strangled
or burned
or beaten,
a new cloud appears.

And after some time,
the clouds cover the sky completely,
and for a long time
there is no light,
until one day the sky grows too heavy
to hold all the clouds it has collected
and the stories fall like rain —
spill over the edges of the sky,
pour into the cracks in the pavement,
fill the gutters to overflowing,
race the fast running rivers
from the tops of mountains
to the pits of valleys,
and they fall from the sky in so many pieces
and so many words
and so many voices

and they are beautiful

and they are terrible

and they hurt like hell.

And somewhere,
despite the pain,
a woman is dancing —

because in the rain
she found a story that could be hers,
but that could belong to any woman
who ever fed her story
to the overcast sky.

And somewhere,
a desert is so flooded with stories
that something starts to grow
where there has been nothing
for far too long,

and the sound of rain
beating into the parched earth
becomes the sound of a thousand voices,
telling a thousand stories,
under the light of a thousand stars,

and the woman who is dancing
isn’t dancing alone.

Revolutions

You ask me what a revolution looks like, and laugh when I tilt back my head and scream just for
the sake of it—just for the sake of hearing my own voice louder than yesterday— “see? It’s still
here” —and we listen to the echoes. You ask me what a revolution looks like and I take your
hand in mine and refuse to let go (even though our palms are sweaty) and together we trace the
canyons carved into my cheeks by tears. I think they’ve gotten deeper. You don’t disagree, but
pull my hand towards canyons of your own. “Mine too.” And together we tilt back our heads and
scream just for the sake of it—just for the sake of hearing our voices dance along the canyon
walls as we dance with them—hand in hand, and listen to the echoes.

Addy Strickland is a student at St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, studying Development and English. Her research focuses on how art and story influence community development. Outside of school, Addy enjoys all things artistic — poetry, photography, visual arts — and spends a lot of her time organizing for social change.