by Kate Finegan

Sarah Grew, detail from *the* *Ghost Forest*, carbon print on glass, carbon sourced from various wildfires, 2022-2023. Courtesy of the artist.

Customs Declaration

Kate Finegan | FEB 2024 | Issue 30

“By the time the distorted ripples of cause and effect make their way back to us, we may no longer recognize that we were the ones who threw a stone into the water.” — Chris Heath, The Atlantic

We did not remember ordering rose stud earrings from another country, and when we opened the small envelopes to find hard black seeds of unknown species, we, some of us, forgot. We stuffed them into drawers or tossed them onto basement shelves. Others among us dampened paper towels and set the seeds out on our windowsills to germinate. Some of us planted them straight in the ground but didn’t eat the strange fruit that grew from the mystery seeds. Some of us shouted conspiracy even as the officials told us no, it’s probably just a scam, and several of us unleashed our racism, our xenophobia, at these strange seeds that might feed strange insects that might sting us all to death. We called this war. Some among us received fifty packets, but when we actually counted, it was more than five hundred. A few of us were getting daily shipments marked as jewelry but containing seeds, a synonym for which is germ. One woman received dozens of unwanted shoes marked as returns, but those came from North America, so no one took much notice.

We forget to remove wet clothes from the washer and we leave the lights on. We forget Tuesday is garbage day and whether we took our birth control. We forget to take our flags inside when it rains, but we’d never admit it. We, some of us, forget to call our mothers, and yet we don’t forget when our addresses appear stamped across some strange parcel, binding an unknown sender to our homes. We heat the seeds at four hundred degrees for twenty minutes, or at two hundred degrees for forty minutes, we can’t remember which, or we triple-bag them and drop them into a dumpster far from our homes. We listen to the modern-day cowboy who advises treating them like they’re radioactive. We remember to buy bottled water and leave it in the basement alongside the protein bars and dehydrated food packs.

We remember what we want to remember. We scroll past the videos of genocide. We listen to the settlers who call this a war. We eat the fruit that we have planted, and we forget to review our order history and see that, yes, there’s the purchase of seeds from that one, and there’s the moment we bought more.

Kate Finegan is a writer and editor exploring the interplay between stories and reality. She serves as novel/novella editor for Split/Lip Press, and her work is supported by Canada Council for the Arts, SK Arts, and Access Copyright Foundation. She lives on Treaty Six territory in Edmonton.

Sarah Grew creates art based in painting and photography, that expands into installation and environmental art and contracts into collage and printmaking. Her work includes a range from public art projects to wall based pieces belonging in private collections nationally and internationally. In researching the concepts that enrich her work she has become a beekeeper, studied native plant habitats, and worked as an Artist-in-Residence for a recycling facility in California. Recently, she was an artist in residence on a science research boat studying the effects of climate change on the plankton food web. Previously, Grew was awarded residencies at Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, Playa Artist Residency, the Djerassi Resident Artist Program, Joshua Tree National Park, the Collegeum Phaenomonologicum in Italy, Brush Creek and the Ucross Foundation. She has also received several support fellowships from The Ford Family Foundation. Currently, Grew is working on a several of time-bending projects; paintings that examine modes of expressing time through layering visual art technologies from different periods and concurrently, a photography project using early printing methods to speak to climate change and the fragility of our planet.