The River Has Roots

by Amal El-Mohtar

(What is a river but an open throat; what is water but a voice?)

Grammar, like gramarye, like grimoire. What is magic but a change in the world? What is conjugation but a transformation, one thing into another? She runs; she ran; she will run again.

Taste is a kind of language, and siblings speak it with a forked tongue.

There are lands that are near to us geographically but far from us temporally: London is not Londinium, though it’s built from its bones.

There are lands that are near to us temporally but far from us geographically: we can be certain that at this moment, in Italy, someone is sitting down to their breakfast with a newspaper dated roughly the same as ours, though we cannot expect to reach them in time to join them for the meal.

There is the grammar of a sentence, which can mean an arrangement of subjects and verbs, or can mean transformation into a tree that bleeds red where it’s cut. There is the grammar of grammarians, refined and removed from its source, and the grammar of witches, daily conjugating water into bread.