In Mongolia, sheets of milky ice stretch over flat plains, go on and on and on, a monotony so strong, very little breaks it. The highway cuts through like a point made in an argument – this is the only way out. Inside the pale Ger, pegged down on the snow, his wife nurses a goat by the stove – too weak to stand or drink from the bowl and all he can think about is how things extinguish if held against each other too long – his marriage dying like an animal outside on the snow. All the things that made him a herder, gone – yet he still goes out day after day to find threads – any thread, to bring in meat, butter, and milk, sees the small heaps of dead ponies and goats on the ice, strung out for miles, thinks it’s the same with himself: with as many collapses. He remembers herding on the bleached grasslands of The Steppe, before Winter became redefined as abandonment where many things left and did not return as they usually did in Summer, where he used to walk hand-in hand with his wife in The Steppe while the cattle, goats, and ponies grazed on the bleached grasslands. His wife’s hand was something to hold and let go of then, all her hand does now is reach out for help he cannot give. What does he do? But move. Into the incarcerated city, minus 27 degrees centigrade Ulaanbaatar, where half a million stoves blow coal smoke, pipe an atmospheric crypt – the sun a yellow blur over ice-crusted roofs gives a vague impression, there was once light there. When his only two choices are broken it’s a noose either way.
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Kathy Tierney is an award-winning poet who has published in various online and print journals. Her most recent publications are in Antipodes (36.1), Two-Thirds North 2023, Centre for Humans and Nature (USA), Anansi Archives (UK). Right Now and The Bridport Prize Anthology 2021 (Long short story). She has a Bachelor of Creative Writing with Distinction from Deakin University Australia and an Associate Degree in Creative Writing from Southern Cross University.
