Scarification
by Nell Smith
Nell Smith, Work in Progress, digital photograph, 2011. Courtesy of the author.
SCARIFICATION
NELL SMITH | FEB 2023 | ISSUE 21
Seeing you now, after an absence that had seemed indefinite, I don’t know what to do with my hands. Bare and creased with soil, I hook them into my pockets so they don’t hang at my side like dumb rocks. The space between us grows thick with questions.
All summer, crowds have come to the canyon in steady currents, yet I’ve only felt small and solitary; deeply rooted is that particular form of loneliness that blooms in company. I kneel with the memory of your warm hand on my skin and unsown lands spread in my imagination. Every day I water and weed and watch the light change across striated stone blotted with juniper and cliff rose; formations I can put names to.
A tiny pea plant called sentry milk-vetch creeps along the canyon’s windblown rim—the gorge watchman. Only an inch or so tall, each plant seems to grow straight from stone, huddling in the junctures of crack and crevice where Kaibab Limestone has turned to dust. How can a plant come from rock, from nearly nothing? The watchman is a clenched fist. Endemic. Their numbers could plummet with a dry spell or spark, which is to say: endangered.
This is an origin story: the high desert is still holding on to winter when the watchman tastes spring in the air and, under twirling eddies of snow, opens pale purple flowers with a delicate fragrance that drifts down Kaibab, down Toroweap, down Coconino and Hermit and Supai and deeper still into the ever-warming canyon until it catches in the innate olfactory memory of Mason bees and hoverflies that alert to the news of nectar thousands of feet above and know that it is time to rise.
Paintbrushes. Quiet hands and paintbrushes are how the watchman’s recovery population is pollinated within climate-controlled greenhouses. Researchers tweeze open the mouths of each flower and softly brush golden pollen from the stamen and some part of my body offers itself up, yearning to know that you are not special. Sex, after all, is sometimes just shapeshifting.
This is a memory: cut grass under our bodies in the city park where you first told me you loved me and then first left me as sprinklers rained down all around us.
Vermiculite, coconut husk, perlite, sand, native soil and mulch—that is the mixture in which I place the watchman’s seeds after I have carefully scarified each with sandpaper, thinning the walls between two potential outcomes. All summer I’ve torn thousands of weeds to prepare the ground for what we call native, only now to wonder who decides that this plant belongs, this one does not.
You know what you are doing, yet you plant yourself before me like you’ve belonged here all along. Xenoliths are rocks trapped inside other rocks. Deep within my pockets, my fingers begin to scarify each other’s prints, pads pressing round and round until the skin grows smooth and thin and raw, and, eventually, I am unshelled.
Nell Smith is a writer and field biologist based in Arizona. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing and Environment & Natural Resources from the University of Wyoming, and her writing has been published in both literary and scholarly publications. Her current project is a multigenre collection exploring the personal and environmental negotiations of love and belonging, excerpts of which have appeared or are forthcoming in Electric Literature, Southeast Review, Camas, Pidgeonholes, Flyway, and elsewhere. She works to cultivate reciprocal relationships between the arts and sciences, and can be found at www.nellsmithwriter.com.