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CHAPTER 1
All the Dainty Broads
Morning Song
A love procedure set me going like a big fat lie.
All night Instagrams and updates Flickr In pixellated dreams. I wake to a beep, stumble Out in my men's nightshirt and stare, blank as a gull,
Into the liquid crystal display.
Or the cloud that archives your words?
What thing? This sleek app that brightens And swallows my thoughts? These two moons That fill my palms and eat my hours?
Vowels rise and hover like drones.
The Couriers
Words from a leaf on the shell of a snail?
Communion wafers wrapped in sealskin?
A box on a meteor compelled by earth?
Frost on the dock at Penetanguishene?
Not a moment to yourself? Spread the cards,
A preponderance of biographers?
RTS, RTS, RTS have their reason.
Women in Fog
Labels descend into blankness.
Tweets leave their trail of Exhaustion; potential Cantors grey and slow
As mules. She would like Suits with bells and sweet,
She opened the window And bid her walk into Optimism. Do not lie
About love, do not Make these difficult Waters a heavenly blur!
They led each other To the screen, spread The rim, and dove.
The Jailer
Feelings are a hopeless theory.
I should have been an epic,
In classics and couture. Poetry Is the big lie. Oh sure, love crashed Into my life, a dark pillar of flight,
A walking muscle with a slick Of black hair. Soon it was legal.
In the bowl of my hips. I stared Into his heart but like the emperor I was too vain, I said, What a tower,
What a prize! Brute love that Line by line we indulged, so crazed We wrote until we tasted
The last of it and stunned ourselves With our emptiness.
If you're going to be a trophy You might as well go for gold.
Ambitious. Let me tell you this:
Humourlessness to fear.
The Rabbit Catcher
He guides you across the floor,
What's in this for you, lady?
Off the roof, written yourself through Paralysis and into your own book.
Bent you to the gilded frame?
The ring without armour. You Strike a blow, bite, don't think To duck. It's all foreplay,
Your body preparing to multiply.
You don't need a tarot pack To see where you are:
In a field of stones.
Don't let him Drink you in, sell your skin,
Cut
But it wasn't a man That knocked me down With the thrill of a slice Of my will.
She was mannish,
At my shock, when she Gripped my neck while Lingering over a request For the evening meal.
Later I sliced a tomato Close to my wrist.
Never to shut it against Her. Otherwise I was free to come And go. Maybe she was
Right? I was zero To the bone? Meanwhile,
Cowered in the reeds.
Soggy green.
Thalidomide; Or, What She Didn't Ask
What planet have I swallowed? What Counsel has thickened my veins?
Have I kneaded into your young minds?
To sleep, I am only trying to spare you The worst of my thoughts.
Take all that I have eaten as gold.
I hold your heads,
I will never know.
A Birthday Present
The light on the coldest night of the year is glacial.
Where nothing grows. When Gertrude Stein was a small Girl she kept hearing a sound she described as nails Striking stone.
Years later she realized this was Emily Dickinson Writing and she took up the axe.
The poems on their steel rails go each According to need. A rogue poem like a wave In a white woollen poncho,
Its fringes a soft broom sweeping down the hall, out Into the evening traffic, which hisses Like a fire that might bring you ease.
Daddy
I feel all the daddies, Sylvia. They brawl inside me like drunken Colossi, elbowing my aorta, kicking my uterus. I hear you wrestling with them too, trying to keep down that one toe, big as a Frisco seal. They rise up again in bean green over blue. I always heard that line as a choke of rage, now I hear you choking back disbelief, then laughing as they turn and turn. Laugh if you will, in the end it was you who was through (or not through), you who coughed your life up into husband-daddy's hands. Still, I envy your arriving at funny. I wish I could laugh when the hands that caught me at birth and later slit me in two like an apricot fly up at me in the middle of sex. Don't complain, the brothers say, at least he showed interest. And that is true: if you're going to defile one of your children, you might defile them all equally. Years later I returned to that hotel room and picked that fifteen-year-old girl up off the floor. What a fool, I thought, so weak, so trusting: my vulnerability repelled. I had no love for it. It was her or me and I wanted to live, Sylvia, so I stuck a dagger in her then, and I said, We're through. She cried out as if I had killed her. I said, Surely you're overstating harm. Surely you can do with a gash or two, a lost limb, a cunt that drags – how greedy you are to want to be whole. You see how inside out I was? So, Daddy, I had to kill you too. I didn't need a knife for you. I made a guillotine of my mind and let it drop. In a blink you were gone. And then you were really gone: the black boot of your lung had rotted from the inside out, and when the surgeon pierced bone, a small Nagasaki was unleashed. But even death did not kill you. You followed me for years, a man in a clean white van, offering me sweet things if I went for a ride. You haunted me with such a look of incomprehension. Didn't know me, or that you weren't through, or why. You turned and turned like an injured bird. I have tried so hard to kill not you exactly – more the you that you left inside of me, Daddy. You once confessed you missed the war, Hitler, the resistance: you said it was the last time you were certain who the enemy was. This is why they stone haunted women. They have to kill them hard to get all the ghosts.
Mummy
after Louise Gluck's 'Vita Nova'
You created me, you should remember me; you leaned your face into the canto of my birth, broke air with me, breathed your best, your unrest, into me, even as you bled, and my father caught me as an eagle takes a trout.
It was a rave, Mother, a real wave and blue, a sprig of fur, the three of us in our first pas de trois. You chewed the cord as he yanked. Before that I was locked in the dashboard with Patsy Cline while you two hurled and ducked and fucked.
You bore me; you should recall the blood you gave me, the bruises, how you breathed your discontent, your troubling, joyous, myste- rious, mean, unquenchable thirst for life in me: you shock of blond, rare as Marilyn, a nubbly shudder of hose
and almond nougat, an edible parchment, a scroll so naive, with such fine print, so in love with your melancholy sex, you slept neatly in Technicolor, confident as a cat. You bore me, Mummy. You with your complicated luck. You should not desert me here,
not now, you should not forsake me at the lip of the mirror where the ego piques, at fifty, or fifty-one. You bathed in ice when menopause came, do you recall? You might have lived, you might have let go of history, made of sorrow a sail,
not a shroud to suffocate your Viking bones, wide and still as glaciers, your thin arms reaching out for Valium, Ativan, Ambien. You gave into yourself my Garbo, my tremolo, my Jeanne dArc, my dragon breather, mother, warrior, pursuer,
giver and taker of dreams, you saved me, and then you left me, don't you recall? Don't you remember your long arms slipping into the womb, not wanting that first painful separation, how you clung to me even before I was breath, before I was open, my mother,
my love, my jailer, your long nails like claws raking around my ears, clamping my eyes closed. You saved me. Wasn't it that? Wrenched me into the world as you would pull an arrow from your back and use it to pick your teeth? You saved me, you should remember
me, my two moles, my wracked brow, my fingers, the flat, the round, my nails, more my father's, like impish insect wings curled, too soft to pull your hairs, grey, my mother, myself, you said you would live for me, you said I would live for you,
to you, in you, you said, Tuck me into your pocket and walk me like a giraffe into Manhattan, just as you tucked me in your bag when you ran to and from him. You saved me, you should know me here with my upturned yes,
without a peony to my name. I come for you on my knees, slither to you on my belly: I am so sorry I couldn't take you. I come still, digging for you to find my head once again, to set me right. To let me go, damn you, let me go.
Fever 103
I was born with a fever. It burned through the first Six years of my life, burned scarlet, burned all night,
To the light, jammed two fingers down my throat,
She was my shepherd, my sight, sang to me as I Convulsed, spewed milk, sleepless, me at her breast,
Years later I was stretched like a banquet on a table,
Light, like a funnel above my head, I felt my body Rise, unmoor, and my mother's terror, saying finally,
Inside my body, and out: I was their Ouija board, my Organs turned. My body snapped back into its skin.
Burn – it's what those without an exit do best.
The body knows what it needs to burn, and will.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "My Ariel"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Sina Queyras.
Excerpted by permission of COACH HOUSE BOOKS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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