Jamestown Redux, Vivian Wagner

“The long experience of our late miseries . . . I hope is sufficient to persuade everyone to a present correction of himself. . . .”

—John Smith, The Generall Historie of Virginia,

New-England, and the Summer Isles (1624)

The starving year started early, even before they arrived, and perhaps it’s still going on. We’re still licking the blood from the faces of the fallen, after all, to nourish ourselves, and we still have companies that lie to stay alive in a wilderness they don’t understand. Maybe, though, we’ll learn. Maybe we’ll earn something like redemption if we piece together this broken egg, if we solve the puzzle of the town, the land, our own violent selves. We, like they, can only hope, while shivering in the almost-forgiving shade of yet-uncut pines.

VIVIAN WAGNER lives in New Concord, Ohio, where she’s an associate professor of English at Muskingum University. Her work has appeared in Slice Magazine, Muse/A Journal, Forage Poetry Journal, Pittsburgh Poetry Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Gone Lawn, The Atlantic, Narratively, The Ilanot Review, Silk Road Review, Zone 3, Bending Genres, and other publications. She’s the author of a memoir, Fiddle: One Woman, Four Strings, and 8,000 Miles of Music (Citadel-Kensington); a full-length poetry collection, Raising (Clare Songbirds Publishing House); and three poetry chapbooks: The Village (Aldrich Press-Kelsay Books), Making (Origami Poems Project), and Curiosities (Unsolicited Press). About her poem, “Jamestown Redux,” Wagner writes, “I wrote this piece as I was reading about Jamestown and thinking how the origin story of that colony is reflected in many of the social and political issues that haunt us today. We haven’t left Jamestown behind, and until we solve its riddle, we won’t be able to move forward.”