June 6, 2022
Audio
West Bond
By Kris Ringman
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West Bond
By Kris Ringman
Sometimes the best things take the most effort:
standing between the spruces with their thick scratchy fingers
pointing every which way—deciding to part ways with a partner
for a solo run up a lonely mountain, over ten miles from any road,
poking its rocky head up from the sea of green around it—
I throw my bag down after little sleep, calves cut from ice and snow,
body sweating already. I wrap a belt bag around my waist and go—
keeping myself balanced on the tightrope snow-peaked trail.
I dance over it, so much lighter without the weight
of my sleeping bag and gear, only falling once,
twice, okay three or four times—
I run because I’ve run since I was a child—I’ve dashed into woods
as my ears went deaf because the trees have no mouths, the dirt
never asks me to listen again and again, to work so hard
to hear its voice. I know every step I take against the Earth
is a gift—this body that looks like a woman however many times
I push it to be as strong as I feel inside, as male.
When did we decide that strength only flows in male bodies?
I saw two women just yesterday, running up and over eleven mountains
in thirty miles around this wilderness in a single day.
Strength is in all of us, but my brain still repeats
the stories it’s been told since I was young with caked dirt in my fingernails
and bloodied knees—that I’m not girl enough—not weak enough.
I race up this rocky peak above the snow and stand at the top, circle
around, feeling all the ways that I am strong as a woman, strong as a man,
feeling so much both, so much neither.
Hikers always talk about the silence out here, but it’s here that I listen:
here that I feel these rocks, these trees dipped in moss and snow,
and the stories of time and nature flowing in every curve across the horizon,
a fluttering, a song on the wind, far beyond the boxes humans create
to tie down every concept of disability and gender.
Out here in these wild woods—I am finally free of it, staring up
at a bird swooping overhead, I squeal as I head down,
and back up to the ridge over to the next peak.
Kris Ringman
Kris Ringman (she/they) is a deaf queer author, artist, and wanderer. Their multicultural, lyrical fiction plays along the boundaries of magical realism, fantasy, and horror. She is the author of two Lambda Literary finalist books: I Stole You: Stories from the Fae (Handtype Press, 2017) and Makara: a novel (Handtype Press, 2012), and the forthcoming Sail Skin: poems (Handtype Press, 2022). They received their MFA in Creative Writing from Goddard College and both their fiction and poetry have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. When they’re not writing, they can be found on the ocean or in the mountains. For more information find them on their website or follow them on Twitter @KristenRingman and Instagram @wanderingnorsefox.
Image description: A person wearing a pale green botanical-printed button down shirt and a black hood with auburn wavy hair escaping it and blowing in the wind, is sitting on rough rocks slightly to the right of center on the top of a mountain with distant alpenglow mountains behind them on the left and the rolling green peak of Mount Bond on the right behind her and a sky that is light blue fading to pale orange along the horizon with strips of puffy light purple clouds.