Darwin: River of Souls, The Bride's Oracle-Thread

Yohanna S.

• Artist Statement

  This piece is shaped by the many kinds of grief I've carried, family illness to cancer, leaving a toxic home, and watching someone I love struggle with depression and self-harm. Those losses made me question what happens to us when life becomes too heavy, and why we imagine afterlives as places softer than the world we are escaping. My best friend once described her imagined afterlife to me, and it felt like she handed a lantern to me in the dark. In the poem, the bride isn't one person; she is every life interrupted before it could fully become itself, my mother, my grandmother, my best friend, and the younger versions of me. The unborn child symbolizes the grief that outlives the dead, the wounds passed down generations. Writing this piece taught me grief evolves. It mutates, and shapes us.

• Creative Statement

  It is life's work, all the reason for a pulse!