Happy Hunting Grounds

Happy hunting ground is known as a Cherokee hunter’s afterlife. It is full of animals and largely devoid of people, as earthly paradises tend to be. It is also a liminal space, where one is not sure to be inside or outside, in paradise or in prison, at home or forever lost, leaping in ecstasy or locked in rigor mortis. Paradise is a place of ambiguity – populated by chimeras and a chimera itself. My “Happy Hunting Grounds” is an elegy to utopia.