Heart

Small appliance.

Balled fist, fingers going white,
bloody marks on your palm –
suckerpunch.

Meat on a plate,
spoiling.

Fussy dud.
To be disposed of.
Red/blue wires crossed.

House
on fire.

Rotten egg and the hand cupping it
and the arm pitching it.

Poke in the eye.

Jack in the box
with a bent lid. Its jaunty tune.

Fine print.

Boy in the closet
with a gun.

Bloody handful.

Oak Hammock Marsh

On the way home, we squashed stowaway
mosquitoes against the windows & picked
burrs from our socks, dropping them onto the mats
& if there were any horseflies beating
against the windshield
where it narrowed
to the thinnest
slice
of sky, we ignored them.

And there were gutted things on the highway
& I was glaring at the roof of the car
when I saw the tick
on your neck
& when you lowered the window
& tossed it out, its legs
skittered against the dry ridges
of skin on your thumb.

As we watched, the sky grew:
we could see all the things that floated in it
& the effort
it took
to remain aloft,
dragonflying & dying across the glass.

A view streaked with wings.

How to Treat Boils

“Tip #1: Apply a slice of a raw potato to the affected area. Raw cabbage leaf is also very good for reducing inflammation and promoting healing.” – How to Treat Boils, wikiHow.

1.
Good-time god of fields, groves, and wooded glens, Pan was half-man, half-goat. He’d eat anything. Grumpy goddess of parking lots, golf courses, and managed green spaces, I’m half-woman, half-gout. Leery teetotaler, I gulp water like wine and gnaw seeping handfuls of woody berries.


2.
Sperm swarm an enormous, indifferent egg.

A full club. Badly-lit bodies besiege the bar, bills bristling from outstretched hands.

Buckshot launches at a doe’s rumpy hindquarters, her head buried in the brush, her mouth working.


3. 
The body shows the work of viruses and bacteria as if it was a canvas, was an entire gallery full of canvases:

Boils, cat-scratch disease, impetigo, mumps, prickly heat rash, rosacea, scarlet fever, swimmer’s itch, thrush.

Ugh. These are our grandmothers’ infections. Where are the post-modern papules, the faddish fevers? I mean the ones that rash you up but let you go, of course. Nothing lethal.

Skin is a thin shield.


4.
When treating mumps, custom decrees wrapping the face, jaw and jowls with linseed poultices.

If cloth bandages are unavailable, strips torn from your petticoats or the drapes (or even petticoats made from drapes) make for acceptable substitutes.

(Likewise, hot toddies and rum punches can be spontaneously swapped for freshly squeezed milk and thin broth.)

Tie the poultices firmly. Your knots should resemble meaty chestnuts roasting on a hearth. They should be a comfort to the afflicted patient. (Jaunty knots are for self-obsessed Frenchmen.)


5.
When I am so run down that it feels as though my eyes might bleed, I get canker sores the size of overwintering ladybugs on my gums.

When I arrive home after a trip, I usually wind up in a doctor’s office, showing her a weepy rash. Look what I found in my armpit!

My favourite thing, mid-infection? To make people palpitate the tender lymph nodes under my chin. Ow. OW! (See?)

Vectors include white-footed field mice, deer, raccoons, opossums, skunks, weasels, foxes, shrews, moles, chipmunks, squirrels and horses.

I once had a pebbly rash that almost completely covered my back and stomach and breasts but once I slipped on a t-shirt you couldn’t tell.

I get hives from budgies, cats, chinchillas, dogs, ferrets, gerbils, hamsters, mice and rats. Anything furry. I once went to a Christian horsemanship camp and spent my week in the saddle with a runny nose.

Over the course of the infection, I manfully gargle hot salt water and touch the sore with my tongue tens of thousands of times a day.

I deeply appreciated the doctor’s shocked inspiration when I carefully took off my shirt.

Fly away fly away fly away home.

Song of...

Your armpit is a red squirrel torn

open on the road.

Your forearms are as cars left

at the curb, mid-summer: covered in aphid shit.

Which is to say you’re mottled. But your shoulder

is a high-beam. A bare gleam.

Your ass is two feral cats

in the auto bin.

* * *

Your eyes the lit tip

of a cigarette

coming towards me

in the dark.

* * *

Yes, your armpit is a dead squirrel.

And your ass is two gasoline pigeons

squabbling in the eaves. Two ginger cats

in the auto bin.

* * *

Your face

the sidewalk puddle

I shuffle through.

Your eyes

my last cigarette.

* * *

Your love for me is a raccoon

living under the porch & licking its lips

on garbage day.

No, wait! Your love is a brown vole

drowned in a pool

in a better neighbourhood.

* * *

Your pursed lips

a thunderstorm

I try to sleep through.

* * *

Your love for me is a raccoon

knocking over garbage cans & growling.

But without you, the streetlights won’t

come on. I sputter, hiccup.

A car rattling down the alley

& never coming home.

Little white lie

 After Raffi's "Baby Beluga."

I met him on a two-hour tour

of the ice floes. Surveilled by zodiacs,

we felt the click of shutters on us

and in us

as tourists leaned out over the water,

their devices reassuring them: This moment.

Yes. You’ve got it. We answered

with the silence of our white flanks, how we turned

and turned. How we were

suspended. But his hands were empty

& his eyes moved

so slowly from snout to side. I was the smallest,

the one always on the extreme edge

of the pod. But I crept closer, the water

as blue as his eyes. Later, he told me

his smartphone was in his pocket,

battery drained.

Or he would have been all over me.

That night, confused by meltwater,

I circled the harbor’s plastic junk & beached

myself when I saw him, thin & drunk

& knee-deep in slush. He’d wandered windburnt

out of the bar, his adventure

gear bright foolishness on the scree

but he clasped me so gratefully,

his nipples small hard stones

against my chest, I thought he knew me.

On the way to his room, I adjusted the drape

of my skin – dingy towel –  around my shoulders

& discovered what it was

to shiver. He muttered

& held me tight, as if I was a sperm whale

and my skull made light enough

for two.

Three years later, my skin –

dirty laundry – was in the baby-bag.

But he left it on the front porch,

brought only his credit card to the hospital.

The labour was as long

as that first night

in the tangle of his arms, as slow

as the train back to the city in the morning.

I wanted to give birth in water,

wanted to wash the baby out, my skin the rag

shaping her, but the big-city birthing center

was delayed and badly over-budget.

So I bore down in a bed,

his fingers rubbing my lower back,

his palm
measuring out my spine.

How to Tell if Someone is Dead

“Warning #2: Do not hesitate to call police/EMS if you think someone is dying or is in fact dead.” – How to Tell if Someone is Dead, wikiHow.

1)

You will be told she is dead, given some cursory explanation. Heart stoppage. Her comfortable old car t-boned on a dirt road. Her body sprawls in the imagination, undone, but there is no proof. And how you will really know she is dead is that you will never see her again.

You will be her Facebook friend forever. It is cruel to unfriend the dead.

2)

A phone that falls between couch cushions & loses its charge.

The scab of feet & fur you find between boxes in the basement, come moving day.

A flashlight that comes out of the drawer chalky with battery acid.

White-white fish bellies floating at the surface.

A spent match, reeking of sulfur.

A butcher’s case full of distended cow tongues.

Her body, going stiff on the floor.

3)

Her reluctant bellyaching is in no way absorbed by the beige walls of the waiting room. Immediate but pointless surgery, her body a tank full of bleached coral & deep sea creatures, blinking. Her body as automaton, as relentless machine, except made of sponge cake & gory jam. Her shrunken, sheeted death, tubes everywhere. And you holding her hand, tight & useless.

4)

A discreet cough.

A powdery compact mirror.

A tentative poke.

A cut onion.

A vicious pinch.

5)

She sleeps in. You leave her undisturbed through the morning, thinking, “She needs her sleep.” You try to make as little sound as possible at first, but then get bolder, your kettle whistling jauntily mid-afternoon. But still, it is her right to sleep as long as she likes. And then you remember you need something in her room. You turn the knob hesitantly, like a thief in your own home. Your irritation shot through with something that tastes like fourteen hours of sleep, like a waking dream. 

Octet

Hey all,

This will be my eighth May Day. And after eight years of shouting for help ("M'aidez!"), I decided to whisper a bit and leave the halloo-ing to Joanne.

Though I haven't been horribly productive the last few years, I happen to be writing a fair bit these days and so am looking forward to sharing poems. Probably not one a day, mind you...but a few a week is possible.

So, to sum: I'm glad to be back and I'm glad not to be in charge.