Current Events

Third in Line

Carefully sorting through your grandmother’s life. 
After the Mass, and the burial, and the reception, 
with those lemon squares you could never stomach.  

There was so much of her to unearth. 

When you found it, gold chain in the palm of your hand, 
you knew it was yours. It was your birthright.  
Miniature engraved scale resting just below your throat. 
Both sides equal and balanced. 

You were the third in a line of Libra daughters,  
inheriting indecision and a dogmatic civility. 
Born two days before your mother’s birthday, 
she always claimed you were her favourite present. 

When the necklace started to itch, 
you kept it on despite the burn. 
*   
Your grandparents met at a church dance, your parents at a wedding.  
Easy stories told over Sunday dinners.   
Comfort in the repetition, it was only natural to fall. 

You always bought into the fantasy.  
Butter yellow flowers, rows of tulle knotted around pew corners.  

You never considered the possibility that the church you were raised in, 
where you had memorized stained-glass windows,  
preformed grade school Christmas carols, 
wouldn’t marry you now. No church would. 

You never wanted to be the one to break tradition. 
*  
You were supposed to be the third in a line of Libra daughters. 
You were supposed to be daughter. 
But the irritation never stopped, 
the necklace heavy around your neck. 

So lovingly created,   
features borrowed, matriarchal in design. 
You couldn’t understand, the feeling devastatingly familiar, 
of your own body ill fitting and confining.  
  
You didn’t know how to tell your mother, 
the second in line, that this body was no longer yours,
that daughter no longer fit. That the procession had stopped.

Called, Culled, Chosen, Caught

                      There you are in the sudden
confirmation of synchronicity
              when the radio speaks the word
                    I am writing. Jack Spicer, move
                           back. But keep talking, please,
                    humming through medium cool.
              So the song responds, corresponds
        to mood. Ordinary, moving. Ordinary,
                                    sacred. Blessed from the beginning, you assert.
And I start in sympathy, startled into sense.
                      All the mediums remark in one refrain that the dead are happy
                      now, talking to us in dream. Hello, hollow. Are you there? Where?
                      Who can hear you among the tumult of the damned, Jack?
          To be named is to be
               recalled from another realm, to be
                       remembered after such dismembering.
This body knows only the present. It obeys the question and strains.
Cartilage gives, ligaments stretch— a kind of inflammatory frieze
that escapes the ultimate dimensional leap so far, that mimetic fear
               caught in the doctrine of signatures.
I lie flat, listening, learning not to recreate
          realities that are no longer yours. Nor mine. Abandon plans, idle
                  curiosity, knowing you lie. Goodbye, Jack.
The dreadful internalized, I am shelled
immobile on a familiar
horizontal, ghosted, going nowhere. Outer light
allows a muffled
       certainty beyond
        gravity, beyond your grave
                      countenance. Who is still
                      speaking, mouthing phrases I hardly hear?
Perhaps if I get your words down just right
I can fool my fate to take this paper
                       substitute
                               for any further injury
                       it might have in mind.
What, I won't ask. Don’t ask.

Sensory Overload, Echolocation in for Repairs

If I can believe my eyes—it’s late,
can’t visualize my heart pain
or so my woman-clock articulates
like a fine-tuned fork chiming
beat-ups per minute.

Did I hear you correctly?
Echolalia’s long drip
convulses through imaginary pools,
I smell the quack of controversy
from here/hear/there

the pitter-patter of its webbed feet,
geese in formation
honking up the wrong tree
makes my ears weep.

Heartbreak keeps showing up in this poem
like a low frequency ping
a mispronunciation
a sour consistent stink
gliding by so close you can almost not not taste it.

Odium flails its wings in all directions.
Caught in its own stone-toothed trap,
ego feathers up you stay me go.

Strange echoes touch me now, like a kindness.
Swans—their love dance plays on my fingertips.
They trumpet a song, one about the mermaid
who learns to swim through fire.

Eighty Land Birds to Know

How are you holding up? the doctor asks
Her prognosis in the way he put his hand on my shoulder
His face both sincere and practiced, his question unanswerable
The technician tilts the screen towards us, a digital Borduas
This language that none of us speak, pictographs
of muscle, bone and blood

This will be the last room, her last view
An avid birder, I hope that she can hear the cooing
of pigeons outside her window
We gather on the ward, restless and nodding,
desperately snatching up any news like crumbs
We stand close together, suspend old grievances
We whisper

Strangers wearing scrubs come in and out
Most are brisk, all are unannounced
We are not privy to the choreography
We learn the names of the sympathetic ones
We thank them. Bring them coffee. Bless them.The hours are measured by paper cups
crumpled and discarded in the bin
The gurgling sounds from inside her chest an alarm
We take turns holding her hand, repeating

It’s okay  I’m here  I love you

A year later, a recipe card
Found tucked between the pages of Eighty Land Birds to Know.
Written in her elegant cursive,
a prescription to follow, precisely measured
I carefully trace each loop and tittle to summon her,
To tell her
        how much I miss her