I Will Build A Wall - Alexis Clements

“A wall,” the farmer thought. To mark my land, to keep my crops, to guard my sheep. “I will build a wall.” Toiling for months in the sun, the heat as much as the cold, turning up soil to turn up the stones. At the start and the end of long days, always adding more. But it didn’t keep out the birds, it didn’t keep out the fox or the wolves, the deer or the weeds, it didn’t even keep in the sheep. And it didn’t keep the forest from returning when the farmer went into the earth. The forest just waited patiently, knowing all along that it was only a matter of time.

-Alexis Clements, 2017
composed while at the Millay Colony for the Arts

By Alexis

Alexis Clements is a writer and filmmaker based in Brooklyn, NY. Her creative work has been published, produced, and screened in venues across the US, Europe, and South America. Her feature-length documentary film, All We’ve Got, premiered in the fall of 2019 in New York City and has since screened around the US and internationally. Her play Unknown also premiered in October 2019 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Other plays of hers have been produced, published, and anthologized across the US and the UK over the past two decades. Her prose writing has appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Guardian, Bitch Magazine, American Theatre, The Brooklyn Rail, and Nature, among others, and she is a regular contributor to Hyperallergic. In addition to her writing and filmmaking, she is currently serving on the Executive Board of CLAGS, the Center for LGBTQ Studies at the City University of New York (CUNY), as a Coordinator at the Lesbian Herstory Archives, and a co-founder of Little Rainbows, a queer story time for children and their caretakers.

See all posts by Alexis

By Alexis

Leave a Reply Cancel reply