Side Effects May Include Strangers 9780228004998

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S i de E f f e c t s M ay In c l u d e Strangers

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t h e h ugh m ac len n an poetry s eri es Editors: Allan Hepburn and Carolyn Smart Titles in the series Waterglass Jeffery Donaldson All the God-Sized Fruit Shawna Lemay Chess Pieces David Solway Giving My Body to Science Rachel Rose The Asparagus Feast S.P. Zitner The Thin Smoke of the Heart Tim Bowling What Really Matters Thomas O’Grady A Dream of Sulphur Aurian Haller Credo Carmine Starnino Her Festival Clothes Mavis Jones The Afterlife of Trees Brian Bartlett Before We Had Words S.P. Zitner Bamboo Church Ricardo Sternberg Franklin’s Passage David Solway The Ishtar Gate Diana Brebner Hurt Thyself Andrew Steinmetz The Silver Palace Restaurant Mark Abley Wet Apples, White Blood Naomi Guttman Palilalia Jeffery Donaldson Mosaic Orpheus Peter Dale Scott Cast from Bells Suzanne Hancock Blindfold John Mikhail Asfour Particles Michael Penny A Lovely Gutting Robin Durnford The Little Yellow House Heather Simeney MacLeod Wavelengths of Your Song Eleonore Schönmaier But for Now Gordon Johnston Some Dance Ricardo Sternberg

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Outside, Inside Michael Penny The Winter Count Dilys Leman Tablature Bruce Whiteman Trio Sarah Tolmie hook nancy viva davis halifax Where We Live John Reibetanz The Unlit Path Behind the House Margo Wheaton Small Fires Kelly Norah Drukker Knots Edward Carson The Rules of the Kingdom Julie Paul Dust Blown Side of the Journey Eleonore Schönmaier slow war Benjamin Hertwig The Art of Dying Sarah Tolmie Short Histories of Light Aidan Chafe On High Neil Surkan Translating Air Kath MacLean The Night Chorus Harold Hoefle Look Here Look Away Look Again Edward Carson Delivering the News Thomas O’Grady Grotesque Tenderness Daniel Cowper Rail Miranda Pearson Ganymede’s Dog John Emil Vincent The Danger Model Madelaine Caritas Longman A Different Wolf Deborah-Anne Tunney rushes from the river disappointment stephanie roberts A House in Memory: Last Poems David Helwig

Side Effects May Include Strangers Dominik Parisien

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Side Effects May Include Strangers

D o m i n i k P a r i s ien

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Chicago

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©  Dominik Parisien 2020 ISB N 978-0-2280-0357-1 (paper) ISB N 978-0-2280-0499-8 (eP DF ) ISB N 978-0-2280-0500-1 (eP UB) Legal deposit fourth quarter 2020 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien. Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: Side effects may include strangers/Dominik Parisien. Names: Parisien, Dominik, author. Series: Hugh MacLennan poetry series. Description: Series statement: The Hugh MacLennan poetry series | Poems. Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20200312197 | Canadiana (ebook) 20200312359 | IS BN 9780228003571 (paper) | ISB N 9780228004998 (P DF ) | IS BN 9780228005001 (eP U B ) Classification: L CC P S 8631.A7469 S53 2020 | DD C C 811/.6—dc23 This book was typeset by Marquis Interscript in 9.5/13 Sabon.

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what is a poem is inside of your body bpNichol

So sorry you understand this Roxanna Bennett

I love the art of us. To one another, we are galleries of solidarity. Imani Barbarin

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CONTENTS

P a i n b y a n y other n am e Let us for a moment call this pain by other words  3 It is not this  4 Bilingual pathways  5 It is not this (II)  6 (B)rain weather  7 Picture book  8 It is not this?  9 To the sadists & the masochists  10 With apologies to those with congenital analgesia   11 Un docteur anglophone traduit les inquiétudes de son patient avec Google / An English-speaking doctor translates the concerns of his patient with Google  12 It is this  14 S t r a nge (r) Bodi es The body calls for guests   17 Calling a body a body  18 To a bi body  19 Writing after targeted assault  20 The wall spelled love  21 Penny   22 Ableist analysis  23 Inside story  24 What you learn, drowning  25 After deciding not to die by suicide, you should be thinking   26 Side effects may include strangers  27 Other body prayer   28 After convulsing in public  30 ix

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Me ta mo r p h os i s To a chronically pained body  33 Can we call this an aubade  34 A portrait of the monster as an artist  35 A mask is not a face  36 Niece with a peach following four minutes of Planet Earth  38 Birthday wish  39 I am learning to forget   40 Concussion   41 Head in a jury  42 Arachnoid cyst  44 MR I , or the new art of anthropomancy  45 Holiday tragedy   46 Post-convulsive recovery  47 Becoming 48 ( D e ) ge ne r ati on Card game with disabled friends  51 To an aged body  52 Afternoon with grandparents  53 The Eganville healer’s compound  54 Upkeep   55 Patient 56 Watch for that horizon  57 Degeneration   58 Words like sand bags  60 I hear you in the broken things  62 You came to say goodbye again  63 Relic 64 A new home  65 Old young man  66 The old man in his room, always in the nude  67 x

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Hospital time  69 Hospital visit  71 To a dying friend  72 Notes and acknowledgments  73

xi

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P a i n b y a n y o t h e r n a me

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Let us f or a mome nt c a l l t h i s pai n b y  ot he r wor d s Ask, How many roses does the hammer weigh when it bears down on your skull? Does the sword seem toothed like a toddler’s smile or sharp as your first ice skates? On a scale of anglerfish to northern lights how bright are the flashes in your head? When I touch this, here, which constellations light the sky behind your eyes? Would you say that pulsing is the flicker of a satellite or the stubborn heartbeat of a newborn chick? Ask, Can we for a moment make of beauty the measure of our pain? and I will answer.

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I t i s no t t hi s

Maybe pain is a prayer the body makes. Ungrateful god, would you deny hallelujahs of red, red worship?

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B i l i ngua l pat h ways

“French people are so hardcore they eat pain for breakfast” pain by any other name would still be bread can we unlanguage associative pathway unfeel into sourdough rye pumpernickel rewrite golden crust carbohydrate as synaptic truth

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I t i s not t hi s ( I I )

Pain is just a delusion the mind indulges. Impressionable fool, why pantomime living a wronged, wronged body?

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( B ) r a i n we at he r



now right now

the words for migraine are metaphor a rat drowning in jelly a failed ice pick lobotomy brain weather this poem carving itself into your skull words are artificial constructs we impose on natural phenomena so a simile like lightning-struck sand crystallizing in the process of becoming fulgurite would work too so long as something violently becomes something else all of you as only brain weather it really is difficult to word when you become the rain 7

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P i c t ur e b ook

Child, your body is not only metaphor. Tell us, do you conjure pain in older forms? As hammer, fire, anvil, nail? As knife? Imagine a picture book of pain: could we call this ache a cactus, a chinchilla, a diamond, or that ill a mole rat, a rainbow, a nebula? Does it hop, skip, dig, or shine? This too is life, child. Learn the words and then invent your own.

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I t i s not t hi s?

A poem the universe composes. We are all subjects of pain, its pen & paper, & are each read & worth reading.

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To th e sa di st s & t he maso ch i s t s

understand none of this is a call to silence understand we too can sing of balmy bruise & burn & ache understand pain is a privilege when chosen

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Wi t h a p ol ogi e s to t h o s e wi t h c o nge ni ta l a na l g e s i a Note: the rules of the dance are simple: if the caller announces a circumstance that has occurred in the lifetime of you or your partner, you must leave the dance floor at once. Anyone with pain Michael Ondaatje, Elimination Dance

Eliminating those with pain leaves no one behind. The dance proclaims we are one in this experience, esoteric & mundane as it is. This companionship says nothing of degree. Compare a sore tooth to a seizure. Broken clavicle to cystic fibrosis. Stubbed toe to fibromyalgia. Say you never danced to begin with, in pain enough you couldn’t. Watched with equal guilt & envy, congenital analgesia on your mind, that with it you might have danced & danced & danced & never even known you ached.

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Un doc t e ur a n g l o p h o n e tr a du it l e s i nq ui é t ude s de so n pat i e n t av e c G o o g l e écoute à quoi bon être poète beau dire ce mal semble dans la tête comme marteau feu enclume clou couteau ou l’éclat d’une baudroie ou des aurores boréales à la fin pour ce qui importe on fait toujours mauvaise traduction la douleur est une langue où les mots sont minable tentative à ce qu’on ne peut que vivre dans le corps écoute docteur toi qui connais la souffrance dis simplement ce mal d’aujourd’hui je m’en tirerais avec de l’aide ou est-ce une peine de mort

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A n Engl i sh- sp e a k i ng d oc to r tr a n sl at e s t he c o nc e r ns o f h i s pat i e n t with Go ogl e listening what good is being poet beautiful say this pain seems in the head like hammer fire anvil nail knife or the brilliance of a monkfish or northern Lights at the end for what matters we always do bad translation pain is a language where the words are shabby attempt we can only live in the body listening doctor you who know suffering tell simply this evil of today I me would shoot with help or is it a trouble death

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It is this

Maybe pain is a poem a prayer a delusion Maybe pain is Maybe pain is.

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S t r a n g e ( r ) b o d ies

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T he b o dy c a l l s f or g u e s t s

Illness a synonym for open. Invitation to pills, procedures, homemade salves & solutions. The world hears Welcome, Welcome, and enters.

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C a l l i ng a b o dy a b ody

A body is lightning in a bottle. Some small miracle, a sequence of events necessary for one. All of them political. Especially those that aren’t. The word strains like us to contain multitudes, defining one thing against another. Me. A mass. A thing passed or a thing of importance. Both boundary & boundless.

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T o a b i b o dy

They always fear the liminal & you they say are a tributary too fluid to be anything but potential for a flood. What they really mean is they don’t know how to swim in another.

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Wr it i ng a f t e r ta r ge t e d as sau lt

a k leans like a held knife straight line with steel blade & handle halfway open everything a metaphor even letters catch the light of an unsheathed knife q a queer boy’s guts spilling out a belly & there & there & there the knife was there always violence hidden in the words unthink back to ignorance this nightmare alphabet all angled wrong slashing everywhere & queer boy guts spilling spilling spilling out of everything & there a knife a knife a knife

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T he wa l l sp e l l e d l ove

I learned jealousy reading of a boy who kissed a wall. Oliver kissed here scribbled on the brick. I knew, then, love was breathing yourself into another; how boys feared getting caught losing themselves through their lips. And here was Oliver, who could have carried me with him forever, giving himself away to a red brick wall.

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P e nny

There is no magic in the world but this: her, sowing copper-plated dreams on concrete & gravel. She divines by a flick of her wrist, by the ring of coin on ground when none watch, thinking, Investments in folklore profit everyone. At night she dreams of rusted coins melting into grasping hands, of bloodstreams thick with wishes.

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A b l e i st a na lysi s

Imagine! A time when a body might have been made myth, conduit to a god, symbol of the wrath, will, blessing of a greater force for its difference. Signifier: coward father; faithless mother; culture’s sin made manifest. Stand-in for entire worlds, able to imbue meaning to all things but itself.

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I nsi d e sto ry

The myth of body is this impermeable place this state of being never porous when the me is almost wholly made up of others.

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Wh at you l e a r n, d row n i n g

Lungs full of river his lips breathe into me new life.

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A fter d e c i d i ng no t to di e b y s u i ci d e , yo u sh oul d b e t hi nk i n g of all the usual gratitudes. Too often is it really life you live is asked of you & yours; tragedy their anticipated narrative. Cue slow pan on some bottles. Hint of bluish arm. Dramatic fade to black. Consider: can you be disabled & contribute something new on suicide, or will all your words read tragic, even when they celebrate? Are you writing using you through empathy or cowardice? If in weariness you call the poem just a poem even once, what harm will that denial cause? Facing suicide, are unanswerable questions the only ones worth asking? Worth ending with?

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Side e f f e c t s may i nc l ude s t ran g e rs

informing you the pills are like a god you might not worship now but will in time; how the way of weakness lies in relying on such artificial things; how breathing on the sacred mountainside of some great distant land cured their friend’s friend’s uncle of some strange ailment; or, that illness becomes a crucible only if allowed.

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O t he r b ody p r ay e r

o let us be like you flawed failures singular & successful none of us a credit or exception stand-in or paragon enough to be unremarkable & common as a cold enough to make monoliths meaningless o let us be like you atoms orbiting each other subjects to the laws of gravity & attraction

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chemical & true to our nature o let us be let us be let us be

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A f t e r c onv ul si ng i n p u bl i c

I like to fuck in protest of this body. I’m told the caring treatment afforded my unconscious self is a testament to the kindness of strangers. I do see in it hope & my own dissolution. Convulsing, I lose the possessive body, become a receptacle for concern, just a thing touched everywhere through kindness left perfumed with the sweat of another’s care. I seem ungrateful because I am permeable in those moments, a body bursting with strangers. Sex is then the privilege of choosing who participates in the choreography of my limbs. My partner’s hands become a knife, carving other fingers from my skin to help me shape myself again.

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M e ta m o r p h o s is

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To a c hro ni c a l ly pa i ne d bo dy

You modern Ovid, you are the tales & the teller. Pain made metaphor is pain made real. Reality seldom allows for it without language. & once worded, metamorphosis follows. Many will make of you a narrative. Some curiosity to interpret. Split the parts apart for meaning. Question the analysis. Then comes another with new interpretation. Definitive theories. Always back to meaning. And you, called malfunctioning machine, broken engine, or some other thing in this new vernacular. Remember: you have a name. You are that body, yes, & that story & more & more & more.

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C a n we c a l l t hi s a n aubad e

here comes the dawn let’s sleepless watch it rise you know i want to write about the pills the way you greet the morning with chemicals the way i do as an aubade & yes one of us would need to leave for an aubade but i think i’m thinking past that point well into the rituals of morning so maybe not an aubade but i love the word because of l’aube & dawn can be a name mais l’aube peut seulement être le matin ou un poème if you bade it & i appreciate the succinctness of pills you know you pronounce pillules with a lull pillull & yes i’m rambling across languages again i know we could maybe fuck away the dawn but desire lulls like the moon or pills & nothing is profound or painless at dawn & i don’t mean pills lull desire our bodies are too tangled in insomnia anyway & besides you hold a pill like the moon on your tongue there one moment gone the next & then comes the day bright & beautiful like you & yes my pills are in the other room someday i want an art exhibit where portraits of pills by bedsides flank smiling faces & the caption asks who are they for & they’re for all the faces & all the faces are couples & can we call this an aubade if i leave to get my pills & come back with birdsong & painkillers on my tongue i can put my pills beside your own for the exhibit & l’aube is well past & you’ve left me here with pills for your dreams so i’ll call this an aubade & kiss you good morning & goodbye

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A port r a i t of t he monst e r as an art i s t

It knows poetry is subjective, how one creature’s poem is the art that beats at the heart of another. At times it fancies itself a fanged Eliot, ripping subject from context to gestate new meaning. It remembers hungering for a greater capacity for abstraction, how as it ate it dreamt of expanding to encompass thoughts on all things that never were. (It mastered only the delicate methods of outrageous violence.) It believes an aesthetic appreciation of the monstrous is not for their like; that the day they explore the canvas of its body will reveal nothing they would call wondrous.

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A mask i s no t a fac e

My skinless daughter is sewing a mask from broad-winged butterflies. She lures them with lemon peel milkweed goldenrod & sand rolled in a ball balanced on her tongue snaps her mouth shut like a flytrap when their wings touch her palate chuckles as their tongues suck at air between her teeth before she does what she does with them. Pierced by copper-headed pins they cover the table like newspapers for a papier-mâché collage (she sometimes dips her fingers in flour & water and lets the mixture dry like skin that cracks when she moves). I have heard it said (poor girl) that she looks like half a blood orange like Mars through a telescope like the underside of autumn leaves & roadside carrion.

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But when I ask & even when I don’t she lies and says Don’t worry and I’m fine and keeps sewing that butterfly mask (such a pretty thing such a smiling thing) with its too-bright eyes & its too-wide lips. I would tell her a mask is not a face it is a lie but when the wings are all sewn and a lace knot tied behind the ears she hands me the mask says Here so you’ll smile more.

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N iec e wi t h a p e ac h f ol l ow i n g four mi nut e s o f P l a ne t E art h nails & plastic cutlery cut & stab & tear the skin at three she has teeth like a beast & the instinct to mutilate understands implicitly she is a predator at the dinner table & survival is sinking herself tooth & nail & plastic tools deep into fuzzy little things

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B i rt hday wi sh

I wish you disease disability for a day I wish you impotence the powerlessness of pain I wish never wanting to wish illness on another were true I wish you sympathy shifting into empathy I wish you understanding

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I a m l e a r ni ng to f or g e t

I hear the best werewolves are bilingual that there are wordstones inlaid in their cheeks with which their teeth stay sharp that their forked tongues can translate days into nights, nights into days. In my mouth is an enduring summer solstice where dawn follows dusk in such rapid succession I barely taste the night. When I howl my voice no longer carries. My teeth do not break skin.

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C onc ussi o n

i would call you but my head is a balloon & the cellphone light is a needle. a needling light. i need light but i don’t think you want me to pop. then again i don’t know what I think. a pop might do me good. i would write you but my balloon is only tethered by a spinal string & now it’s caught up in a corner with the cobwebs & the dust. the oxygen is thin here & i might be high from being high. still, i wish I could tell you a story. i can’t, while my head is a balloon. balloons aren’t very good with words – we’re nothing but hot air. if the air left my mouth, i might come down, but i don’t think I have a mouth. you should know – my elastic skull is wearing at the ceiling. it is bumpy, sort of misshapen – the ceiling – i mean, my head too, probably. got shoulders white with dandelion stuff – no – with ceiling fluff like dandruff. dandelions are for a world beyond the windows. at least i can fly. or maybe float. flies fly. flies don’t wear through ceilings like balloons though. we’d see the sun through our roofs if they could. needling sunlight piercing through, popping us balloons. you know, it doesn’t feel healthy, a balloon trapped inside this way. do we balloons even have eyes to be needled, or do we just think we do? maybe that’s really how balloons end, not with a sunlit pop, but with a whisper. just that low sound of a balloon wearing through a ceiling, until it reaches sky, floats/flies away & someone, maybe you, looks up & whispers: hey, I could see my house from there. not that i could hear you – we balloons have no ears. all balloons have are thoughts, i think. & that’s all we can do. think.

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H e a d i n a j ury

tar tarped trapped in rain fig brain fig brain frog brain fog i hop you under sand sink stuck what i me main by brain flog is i fell disco neck net ted no no feel earthed unearthed unteethed untethered untethered a frag fragile thing rhino rye now end

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i wan to be tethered aging again my whirls are words are errant right right now young know like learning a land gauge language where a world seems so sin pull just one thing until you wrong it write it sway it say it wrong car crack it open end all me more meaning spills out 43

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A r ac h no i d cyst

The boy knows arachnoid means his head is home to a spider. He obsesses over empty cobwebs, all those hungry eyes in the darkness of his skull. Declares entomologists assassins. Says the spider is the soul.

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MR I, o r t he ne w a rt of a nt h ro p o m an cy

Hard not to think of you as a tool of divination. They say your parts can see it all or near enough to feel like fate. They’ve read the bones, the liver, the whole of me and found the omens unfavourable the future too difficult to determine so they break me down again & again to bring me into being in your image. Perhaps me breathing is the problem how your shriek, screech, howl has me wriggling in your mechanical mouth. Seeing their frustration, I wonder if your seers ever envy the old prophets the way a blade made a body easy to interpret.

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Hol i day t r age dy

broken ornament by convulsing body long-desired heirloom ruined in a moment white eyes & shards reflect the lights family grief shines Christmas bright don’t look here for metaphor the body is nothing like the ornament

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P o st- c onv ul si v e r e c ove ry

today beauty moves small the bed as balcony overlooks the stage

a glass of water refracting sunshine into spotlight a dust mote pirouetting by the air vent breathing breathing in applause

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B e c o mi ng

there was no becoming Death had to be born dead to be itself I used to dream of thirty-two that I might live to be so ancient what does it mean now to set aside becoming and be this man I barely imagined I hope to turn sixty-two and not be afraid to dance naked in the rain I hope to turn ninety-two and remain surprised by who I was and am and might become I hope to always be nothing like poor Death that only ever knew exactly what it was

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( D e ) g e n e r at i on

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C a rd ga me wi t h di sa b l e d f ri e n d s

Death was at the table because of course it always is. We were in that moment no more or less aware of it than you. What else is there to say except that we were young & old & maybe pained or that we played & breathed & were.

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T o a n age d b o dy

Time has written poems on your skin. A lifetime spent studying their lines until we too are poemed would embody beauty.

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A ft e r no on wi t h gr a nd pare n t s

It felt like Communion, their slow dance in the kitchen. Somewhere a ghost-voiced radio played and the song was God promising forever, only watching them I knew it must be true.

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The Ega nv i l l e h e a l e r ’s c o m p o u n d

We went there as a family once. Being secular, I believed in salvation through the self or science, not charms or charlatans. But when medicine failed me, my mother & father, devout followers of the church of parenthood, reached out to him & God & anything they thought could help me. At his compound we found dollars drowning in his wishing well; a counter full of prayer cards & chocolate bars; a wall of postcards proclaiming him a god -ly man; & a platter overburdened with bills, the marks of his charity. In his office, I felt only emptiness at the miracle of his touch. And, he promised, laying on hands was possible even at a distance through the wonders of technology. Polaroids were the pictures of faith. They were hung in his chapel like saints & shot by those who ached with love for the afflicted. Later, my parents captured me & my pain and mailed us to his compound packed with their hopes & their money.

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Up k e e p

Where it only used to whisper like wind through a bone now the old chair creaks a shrill note under me. I sit & watch my father impersonating furniture with my young niece. So certain he’d been grandfathered in to his mother’s early end he’d told me while lying on the hospital bed how the time had come for change. Now listen to him with my niece. Together they hit that antique pitch of finite things that with some upkeep seem like they might last forever.

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P at i e nt

waiting the heart spites the call to still not / now not / now not / now not / now not / now not / now not / now not / now

not / now

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Wat c h f or t h at hori zo n

You gave us pebbles from the seashore, driftwood pale & brown. We peeled the flesh from our fingers, broke the bones off at the knuckles, set your stones in one by one, wore driftwood gloves to hold them together. We carry the weight of salt in our hands. Our fingers ache for warm shores. We kissed your forehead goodbye. The skin like a plastic ­water bottle. You drifted out to sea on a raft of our bones.

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D e ge ne r at i o n

When we speak in the abstract of generations dissipating

Soon, that way of thought will die with them

we so often hope for the extinction only of an other. Like grammar, exceptions are everywhere: please, not our parent or pépère. Just the fading of the older. * When they speak in the abstract of generations degenerating

Back in my day children weren’t, well, whatever this is

they so seldom see anything but themselves. In the absence of their mother or mémère, the words of old become their own. *

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When we speak in the abstract of generational dealings

I would or we won’t, we were or we didn’t

we all forget past and future are not just times or tenses but languages we think we speak fluently.

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Wo r d s l i k e sa nd bag s

There is a shadow world in the pendulum swing of her arms when her weathered fingers release the sand bags

Pocket: 200 the hole is a universe deep and she is falling fracturing her bones like a glass maze cracking down to dust always on the floor

Pocket: 100 the hole is dark midnight and a bald stranger in her bed wipes her tears says if she waters her hazelnuts trees will grow out of her head

Pocket: 0 she misses the board her fingers recall his chest with hair thick like moss the length of him she cups the sand bag just so smiles knowingly not remembering why exactly

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Pocket: 500 the hole is light shining off the scissors with which she says she cut your hair as you slept to make you pay for the curls she never had

Pocket: 500 the hole is six feet deep her sister asked to be buried whole and not burned to keep the curls she mocked her for and her husband held her hand so cold and he is cold on the bed they should loosen his collar to let him breathe to let him breathe please let him breathe

Pocket: 500 the hole is an open mouth and her tongue throws words like sand bags

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I hear you i n t he b ro k e n t h i n g s

You are here, still, scattered among us: your eyes & dinner plates crooked fingers & quilted blankets webbed toes & old oak bookshelves. Your croaking voice we find in car crash doors, crows, and creaking floorboards. A sound you birthed accidentally as a child when you drank down burning candle wax and brought your own voice screaming into the world.

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Y o u c a me to say goodb y e ag ai n

you say we’ll do it right this time. or the next. we have my lifetime for goodbyes. you won’t say dreams are monologues. your pacemaker too denies death. in a field it beats a steady here I’m here I’m here I’m here. dreams are the pacemakers of grief. memory struggles or slows or stops & dreams shock me to remembrance.

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Relic

There was no escaping your molecules for a time. Then, another death. A deeper grief: your bedroom’s mildew scent abandoned the blanket we inherited. So little of you left is left. But, of course, the afterlife is in our hair. On my nightstand is a reliquary: a novel bookmarked with a hair strand from your kitchen floor. What is a poem if not hair spread across a page, an invitation to believe? Who even knows to whom the strand belonged. Or if it matters in the end.

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A ne w h ome

listen there are peas in my shoes crushed flat flavoured by my feet there is a reason the reason is the angels here are keeping me keeping us from preparing for the move to a new home they say this is my home they call it that a home they need it to be that and it is it was but now they want me in a new home so they cannot retire no but nurse me me with all my children grandchildren too how they think i need that is beyond me and why could you please explain why there are peas in my shoes yes there are lists always lists in life and i need to be listed first for my new home but when i hold the button for first in the elevator the voice tells me to let go i need to let go and the angels come and you must be an angel here to take away my peas

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O l d yo ung ma n

Youth is not a shield but a spell the illusion that for a time one should be immortal untouched. You are too young to be so ill. Why tell me I am wrong impossible as I am when I am here.

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T he ol d ma n i n h i s ro o m , a lways i n t he nud e The stories they tell in the kitchen arming themselves with dinner trays: He clothes himself only in clouds of cigarette smoke. He is a virgin desperate for a fuck. He set fire to his uniform after the armistice & forever swore off cotton. He is a disgraced royal of an unknown dynasty. He exists only by the grace of government subsidy. He never outgrew his northern Ontario cult.

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He is the living embodiment of toxic male entitlement. He was in a movie once, you know, that one.

He had only a shirt to gamble with on Wednesday night poker.

He has dementia eating away at his sympathy for the staff but not his appetite. Maybe he is exactly who he says he is.

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Hosp i ta l t i me

1. Is this a day people want or need their hands on you?

2. “I am the measure of all things.” Seven steps: a space with freedom to piss in a bowl. Eleven steps: a glass to oversee a maple contemplate the parking’s symmetry the disorder leaves might cause come fall. (They should bring in dirt & trees. Rooms & bodies need the messy stuff for life.) Twenty five steps: the insight counter where you gift the nurses your wisdom.

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3. Imagine all roads leading somewhere not a bed.

4. If you are to channel pain you want television’s technicolor range in language. To colour in each ache.

5. That fear of becoming just an object of study.

6. Time is a dripping down your I V line.

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Hosp i ta l v i si t

she is half phantom i am her shadow grandson friendship makes us blood

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T o a dy i ng f r i e nd

You say, I was so beautiful once but I never knew that ancient beauty only this body like a forest fire like a field of bones its boundaries impossible to distinguish from the bed sheet. You say, I wish they’d let me die in my red coat but no, that thin blue robe is home. You say, We are not really here, in this now and, true, together we are Janus. You say, Tell me stories I give you your words a fashionista on a Vespa teasing dreams and gas money out of officers a fabric stitcher with gods in her needle a friend asking for a final sip of whisky from my flask. You say, Let us now drink that great unknown yes, here’s to all those stories never told.

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N o t e s a nd A c k nowl e d g m e n t s

Versions of some of these poems appeared in the following publications: The Literary Review of Canada, The Puritan, prism International, Riddle Fence, event , The Antigonish Review, This magazine, Canadian Medical Association Journal (cmaj ), Geez, Bywords, Plenitude, Wordgathering, Uncanny magazine, Strange Horizons, The Quilliad, Goblin Fruit, inkscrawl, Glass: A Poetry Journal, Poetry Pause, The anti-languorous review, guest , Big Smoke Poetry, Train, Yes Poetry, Atticus Review, and boaat . Some of the poems were originally published in We, Old Young Ones, a chapbook printed by Frog Hollow Press. My thanks to all the editors for their support. “Bilingual pathways”: the line “French people are so hardcore they eat pain for breakfast” comes from a popular internet meme. The words usually accompany an image of bread as a play on the French word for bread: pain. “With apologies to those with congenital analgesia”: According to the US National Library of Medicine, “Congenital insensitivity to pain is a condition that inhibits the ability to perceive physical pain. From birth, affected individuals never feel pain in any part of their body when injured … This lack of pain awareness often leads to an accumulation of wounds, bruises, broken bones, and other health issues that may go undetected.”

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“You came to say goodbye again”: the idea of a pacemaker continuing to function after death came from Dr Eric Van De Graaff’s article “Pacemakers and Death.” “The Eganville healer’s compound”: Richard Dale, a selfprofessed faith healer, ran the Dal-Grotto Mission in Eganville, O N , for over fifty years. “Hospital time”: the line “I am the measure of all things” was borrowed from Leena Krohn’s novel Tainaron: Mail from Another City. I owe a great debt to Dr Shane Neilson and Roxanna Bennett, both excellent humans and poets. Shane’s research on pain has been invaluable in helping me approach pain in my own work, and his writing and support of the disabled community have had a great impact on my life and my career. Roxanna’s writing and correspondence have been a joy and a balm for my days, and her friendship has helped my work reach new heights. No single work of poetry has ever resonated with me quite as deeply as her chapbook unseen garden and later her collection unmeaningable. Anyone interested in disability poetics in Canada and in general would do well to find the work of these remarkably talented people. I am very grateful to Allan Hepburn, Carolyn Smart, Mark Abley, Kathleen Fraser, and the entire McGill-Queen’s University Press team. Thank you also to David Drummond for the beautiful cover.

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My heartfelt thanks to Terese Mason Pierre, Elsa Sjunneson, Shazia Hafiz Ramji, John Williamson, K.S.Y. Varnam, Ally Fleming, Kirby and knife | fork | book, Erin Soros, and Andrew Sullivan. All my love and thanks to Jen Albert for all she does. A thousand thank yous to Dr Stephanie Kwok – you are a credit to your profession. Thanks as well to the medical team at Women’s College Hospital and the wonderful people at Nova Pharmacy. I’m so grateful to the Ontario Arts Council and the various recommender publishers for their support as I worked on this manuscript and others. It’s changed my life. To my family: you continue to make it all possible. You have my love and gratitude, now and always. Finally, to all my disabled friends and colleagues: your work matters, your lives matter.

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