Excerpt from "Of Blood I've Been Told"
Excerpt from "Of Blood I've Been Told"
By Matt Smythe
I was smaller than my sister when my dad told the story of the stones, Indian heads, hard heads, smooth-solid and half buried in shale flakes below the high banks at the south end of the lake.
Seneca, Canandaigua.
These waters are the print of the Great Spirit’s hand, the story goes.
Cayuga, Owasco.
These hills grew from between the Spirit’s fingers and the valleys beyond them.
Skaneateles, Keuka, Otisco.
My people were born of this place, of many places. Skulls turned to stone in death.
Smaller ones were those of children my size.
Honeoye, Hemlock
I picked them out of ankle-deep water, asking- this one? And this?
Deeper the lake at my belly, I would find larger stones with bare feet and stand on their easy angles like pale green hillsides.
Matt Smythe from the Finger Lakes region of western New York. An Army veteran and lifelong outdoorsman, Matt suffers from an inability to sit still. If he’s not in the woods, or on the water, he’s scheming ways to get there. His work has appeared in Free Range American, Gray’s Sporting Journal, the Fly Fish Journal, The Drake, Southern Culture on the Fly, Revive, Midcurrent, TROUT Magazine, and a handful of other non-outdoors-related magazines and literary journals. He recently published a book of poetry with Dead Reckoning Collective titled Revision of a Man.
Follow Matt’s blog, Glorious Mayhem here.
What’s happening at VetRep…
The Parlor is back! This coming Saturday will be the first showing of “The Absurdity of it All” by Chris Soucy, a VetRep Resident Artist. Chris is an Army veteran, co-founder of Odd Lot Improv and the Savannah Shakes Theater Company, and has worked as an actor, puppeteer, writer, director, and filmmaker, with over 30 years of experience in the theater industry. We are thrilled to produce “The Absurdity of it All”, as the first full-length play written for VetRep by a Resident Artist, promising a truly unique performance you can’t get anywhere else. Get your tickets before they sell out!
We would also like to extend our gratitude to Arts Mid Hudson for awarding VetRep the Duchess programmatic grant in support of this production.
This project is made possible with funds from the Statewide Community Regrants Program, a regrant program of the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature and administered by Arts Mid-Hudson.