soundonreadings - Tumblr blog

soundonreadings · 4 years

Text

Sound On InstaReadings Series Volume 6 with Betsy Warland & Alison Acheson

Welcome to Sound On InstaReadings. This is our final event of the season and features Betsy Warland and Alison Acheson and is hosted by David Ly, Cynara Geissler and Dina Del Bucchia. Thank you for joining us for our spring events. See you (virtually) in the fall! Bio:

Betsy Warland has published 13 books of poetry, creative nonfiction, and lyric prose. Warland’s 2010 book of essays on new approaches to writing, Breathing the Page— Reading the Act of Writing became a bestseller. Author, mentor, teacher, manuscript consultant, editor, Warland received the City of Vancouver Mayor’s Award for Literary Excellence in 2016.ALISON ACHESONAlison's IG handle is @alisonacheson. Her email is [email protected]. BIO: ALISON ACHESON is the author of ten books, including the memoir Dance Me to the End: Ten Months and Ten Days with ALS Brindle & Glass), and the short story collection Learning to Live Indoors (Porcupine’s Quill), which was praised by the Globe & Mail for its “arresting and crystalline clarity”. She teaches creative writing at the University of British Columbia, and lives in Vancouver, BC.

Reading Text:

The Human is at a loss for words

The Human is at a loss for words. Considers. And, considers. Wonders, is this loss of words perhaps why The Human is a writer? The desire to describe something that The Human cherishes makes words scatter like a flock of startled bushtits. The very word “cherishes” is suspect. Passé.

Okay, The Human thinks (again), let’s begin with its name: Lost Lagoon. Its very name is a conundrum. How can one misplace a lagoon? Standing on the shore any passerby can observe it’s not a lagoon but a small lake or, perhaps, a pond.

Over the decades, The Human has walked around the lagoon chatting with various companions, but now dwelling close to it, lives with it. The difference between “around” and “with.” Difference between pointing with camera, voice or index finger, and standing still—watching, listening, sniffing, occasionally speaking softly or returning a bird’s call.

Just across the street from the high- and low-rise buildings’ cheek and jowlness, Lost Lagoon life is___________. Once again, The Human is at a loss for words.

The lagoon resists being depicted. Summed up. The Human admires this.

That said, under the cover of darkness and human absence,

That said, under the cover of darkness and human absence, the lagoon spills into surrounding life. Many are the nights that The Human is jolted awake by alarmed quacking of geese and ducks. Coyote, owl, or otter on the prowl have startled them: their panic echoes inside The Human’s head.

For years, decades in fact, whenever visiting

For years, decades in fact, whenever visiting Stanley Park, The Human puzzled over its name: Lost Lagoon. How did it get this nonsensical name? It seemed an oxymoron or a Zen koan. Then water drove The Human to water. The apartment flooded, and The Human moved here.

Just like the magnetism of the river four kilometres away from the family farm, Lost Lagoon magnetized The Human. Now, this close proximity has provoked an investigation into its curious name.

One might guess that it was named by a poet. Indeed it was. E. Pauline Johnson, part Mohawk part English, was fond of paddling her canoe there when it was a quiet cove. Here a “however” hovers. With summer tides, during Johnson’s favoured paddling time, her refuge was temporarily lost. Then, was lost permanently in 1916 when construction of the Stanley Park causeway cut the cove off from the sea. Lost, too, for the Skwxwú7mesh / Squamish, Musxwməθkwəy’əm / Musqueam and Səl’ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh / Burrard nations’ peoples who harvested clams and other sea life from the mudflats for generations, probably centuries.

“Lost, leu, to loosen, divide, cut apart.” The causeway separating the sea and the tidal flat.

“Lost, leu-, forleasan, to forfeit,” these unceded territories of the Indigenous Peoples.

Lost, another word for taken.

#31

Picture it as a slightly aberrant-shaped lima bean

Picture it as a slightly aberrant-shaped lima bean—six blocks wide by four blocks across—with a 1.75 kilometre gravel and earthen path hugging its shoreline, these in turn held by conifers and deciduous trees’ protective embrace. Notice its well-camouflaged beaver lodges: one on the south end; one on the north end. Picture its ceaseless reflective conversation with the trees and ever-changing sky and movement of air. Keep in mind how close it came to obliteration numerous times, the final attempt by the Vancouver Trades and Labour Council to get the city to drain it, fill it in and make a sports field. Whisper a thank you to those who worked to have it officially declared as a bird sanctuary in 1938. In the early fall notice how the Canada geese congregate at the narrowing arm leading to the stream in twilight. Puzzle about how strangely quiet they are, and why two or three adults take turns paddling to where the lagoon opens, then retreat. Paddle out. Retreat. The Human is mystified: “What are they waiting for?” Then imagine them suddenly, soundlessly unraveling in an unbroken line that swims as one being across the lagoon to where they spend the night. It takes a few times before The Human understands. The adults are waiting until the eagle has turned in and it’s safe. This choreography as eloquent as any The Human has ever seen.

Bio:

Alison Acheson is the author of ten books, including the memoir Dance Me to the End: Ten Months and Ten Days with ALS Brindle & Glass), and the short story collection Learning to Live Indoors (Porcupine’s Quill), which was praised by the Globe & Mail for its “arresting and crystalline clarity”. She teaches creative writing at the University of British Columbia, and lives in Vancouver, BC.

Dance Me to the End by Alison Acheson (TouchWood Editions) “Mary & Martha” – excerpt for SoundOn reading series

The sense I had at the outset, that we were still us, was beginning to feel over-populated. There were perhaps too many of me.

There was this irritating me—the one who organized and understood the need to think about tomorrow and plan for next week, and even take a peek at what might be required of me a month from now. The one who even knew to turn off my brain (or tried to) if thoughts went beyond next week or month. She was necessary. But she made me squirm. Because I wanted to be someone else—a loving spouse, or artist daydreamer. Or at least someone who could dream at night, asleep. This other person I was revealing myself to be seemed incapable of anything beyond list-making and research and careful cooking.

To my mind came the Biblical story of two sisters, Mary and Martha, and their brother, Lazarus.

I grew up with those stories. Every Sunday my father opened that big book with its magic of old English, and read. The stories embedded at cellular level. It’s the figure of Mary, at Jesus’s feet, listening to his words, that was imprinted on my mind, as it is in many minds of those growing up in Christian faith. I don’t know how that image resonates with boys and men, but as a girl it spoke to a hierarchy of tasks.

It is surprising to return to the actual text and discover the words from which church leaders have extracted these guiding thoughts, and images. The sisters are evoked in such brief verses, a handful of words, that have been expounded upon, dissected, painted by artists, interpreted, and re-envisioned. There are several vignettes in the books of Luke and John that show us the sisters, Martha intent on making and serving food, and Mary sitting at Jesus’s feet, listening, rapt.

The verses in the book of Luke say that Martha was “cumbered about much serving,” and approached Jesus, and said, “Lord, dost thou not care that my sister hath left me to serve alone? bid her therefore that she help me.” And Jesus answered: “Martha, Martha, thou art careful and troubled about many things: But one thing is needful: and Mary hath chosen that good part, which shall not be taken away from her.”

In another story, Mary “took a pound of very costly oil of spikenard, anointed the feet of Jesus, and wiped His feet with her hair. And the house was filled with the fragrance of the oil.” She even took some grief from a disciple who thought she shouldn’t have spent the money on the ointment.

I wanted my house to be filled with that fragrance. After all, given the choice between a foot massage and kitchen work, I’d take the massage. And Jesus said that Mary’s listening was “that good part” of the sisters’ actions. In churches, even in the family Sundays of my growing up, that message of taking time to listen to Jesus, to make him the centre, was held up as the model. Martha was the woman in the kitchen, away from the saving words, and mired in chores and daily grind.

I have long held images and notions in my mind about these two and, as others have, I’ve tried to grapple with their significance and meaning. Was it possible there was some sustenance left in these ancient stories? I’d long ago put aside the bindle-stick of paradigms that seemed to belong to my childhood.

As a caregiver, these two women began to visit my mind, heart, and soul regularly, sometimes separately, sometimes together. In my heavier months of caregiving, they just showed up without being asked, and stepped through the doorway—Martha with a look of superiority in her unflagging energy, and Mary with such accusation: What was wrong with me that I didn’t understand that love—simple love—had all one needed to get through? All you need is love.

You don’t understand, I wanted to say. To both.

What about a third sister, one with shared qualities and more? But no. The stories, at first, seem to have a reductive nature; humans tend to like either/or. For our children, we call it choice therapy. It’s supposed to ease life.

I have looked at areas of my life in my past, and wondered whether I am one or the other. As a wife, I’ve ached to be Mary. But more often, as a mother of three, working in and out of home, I’ve had to be Martha. You know Martha wives and mothers. We’re the ones who opt to be designated driver with one glass o’ red, no more, over taking a cab and figuring out a way to retrieve the vehicle the following day.

We make meals that result in real leftovers for next-nights when there are multiple sports or music lessons. And we know how to make leftovers tasty, and how to keep straight in our minds and on our calendars all those classes and practices and games, alongside our own work schedule.

Martha is capable and convenient. But even as a writer, Mary has been my go-to desirable—the bohemian, the artist, the one who eschews the everyday concerns, and can spend hours looking out the window. Mary indulges. And I am pulled towards her. Then, too, that commendation of Jesus. No small thing. I’ve heard about it often, sitting in a pew. Mary hath chosen that good part.

Though, left entirely to Mary, would the words get on the page?

I let that thought drift away.

In the third story, Martha goes out into the town to find Jesus because their brother, Lazarus, has died, and she wants to ask Jesus why he did not come earlier when he might have saved him. Mary stays home to grieve. In this story, Martha affirms her faith. Jesus reassures her. And he resurrects Lazarus from the dead. This story is less often told from the pulpit.

In the days following Marty’s diagnosis, I found that point of acknowledging that this was an opportunity to show him what he meant to me. It was, to my mind, the highest calling of love: to care until the end. In Leonard Cohen’s words, Dance me through the panic ’til I’m gathered safely in / Lift me like an olive branch and be my homeward dove / Dance me to the end of love.

In my journal, through the months, are notes of almost prayer: Let me feel our connection through this. Let me be there when he goes. Give me the good to remember, and to sustain through the inevitable pain. Yes, the panic.

No one said to me, “You are a romantic idiot!” If they had, I would not have listened. Who would be brave enough to say that to someone trying to face a recent terminal diagnosis? Would I? Even now? People do say, all the time,

“This will draw you closer together than you’ve ever been,” which is, to my mind, a spectacularly stupid thing to say—to assume. But at the outset it seemed possible, desirable.

These people generally added words about this idea being based on observation of their grandparents’ marriage, for- getting that they were nine and a half at the time, and there is so much that children miss—willfully so, perhaps—about adult connections and misconnections.

So caregiving might begin with Mary, but what about Martha, with her wide hands and square-tipped fingers, broad in hip and shoulder? Her lips are full; she prefers to smile than not, and her smile is open and free of guile. She’s lost the art of flirting and seduction. Long ago she depended on being young for that, but now she counts on someone liking her hand-tossed pizza. I wouldn’t be taken in by her pizza.

Mary, Mary, Mary, with your slim hips. Let me follow you. Show yourself.

Even as both called to me, I knew in my gut that it was Mary I wanted to follow, if I had to choose. If I could choose.

0 notes

soundonreadings · 4 years

Text

Sound On InstaReadings Series Volume 5 with Conyer Clayton

Welcome to Sound On InstaReadings. This event took place on Friday June 5th and was hosted by David Ly, with poet Conyer Clayton reading. Bio:

Conyer Clayton is an Ottawa-based writer, musician and gymnastics coach. She has 6 chapbooks, 2 albums, and won The Capilano Review's 2019 Robin Blaser Poetry Prize. Her debut full-length collection is We Shed Our Skin Like Dynamite (2020, Guernica Editions). Stay updated on her endeavours at conyerclayton.com. Reading Text:

Blackout

Maybe if we hang enough butterflies on invisible strings we’ll enjoy it here, be fooled

into a smile by bright colours and a song on repeat.

Lullabies cramp your style — your legs drawn into a ball. See you tonight

maybe? The music builds forced, sheets pulled tight over crumbs.

The sun’s been shining while you’ve been sleeping, shining for hours through a blind broken window.

*Appears in We Shed Our Skin Like Dynamite (Guernica Editions, 2020) https://www.guernicaeditions.com/title/9781771835091

Setting an Alarm

In a Bathrobe

Sweet potato sitting soggy in a doggy bag next to you and a leftover oyster roll. You tracked in snow from spite, despite my pushing away. No. I said, no. I’m busy. You’re relentless, you know?

Untied

And then you brought a cream and pesto pizza in your workplace box from across slickened streets, so thoughtfully. Moments after I pushed him out, I begged you to stay.

In Bed

I sleep alone on purpose, with regret.

*Originally published in Talking about strawberries all of the time, Spring 2019

*Appears in We Shed Our Skin Like Dynamite (Guernica Editions, 2020) https://www.guernicaeditions.com/title/9781771835091

United Air

We drink beer from pale blue cans on the front porch, and talk about those last seven years. I’m sorry, just so sorry. We’re always sorry.

We take another drink.

I returned that guy's broth pot and colander. Left them outside his shitty apartment door with a note written on the back of an online airplane reservation.

*Appears in We Shed Our Skin Like Dynamite (Guernica Editions, 2020) https://www.guernicaeditions.com/title/9781771835091

You May Not Reach 65

Your nicest sweater — cashmere bought in an open market, teeth flashing, slapped fish and pomegranates

in a straw basket, a preordained jar of spices. Tap, tap, crush and pour, finally it’s you. Only you.

I avert my gaze, dried spinach and lamb, your unwashed hair, your surprise age.

How can you be proud? Your eyes are lost and wrinkled in the light.

Too much? you ask me. Too much? A struggle to grasp. Don’t forget which mug is yours.

*Appears in We Shed Our Skin Like Dynamite (Guernica Editions, 2020) https://www.guernicaeditions.com/title/9781771835091

A Record on Repeat

We sent ourselves through the air, a kiss to the stars planted on your best friend’s cheek, a record on repeat to reference how I feel, to reassure what I already know; that an adjustment is necessary.

I am repulsed to notice myself. An empty arm-nest, longing.

This foils our plans for independence, for nights spent in confidence.

I’m just an inconsolable fold of skin over nerves.

I’m just the person I need to be, all the things I can’t stand to hear you say.

*Appears in We Shed Our Skin Like Dynamite (Guernica Editions, 2020) https://www.guernicaeditions.com/title/9781771835091

0 notes

soundonreadings · 4 years

Text

Sound On InstaReadings Series Volume 4 with Jillian Christmas & Lauren Turner

Welcome to Sound on InstaReadings Series. Our second installment features readers Jillian Christmas & Lauren Turner and is hosted by David Ly and Cynara Geissler.

Posted here for your enjoyment are the bios of our fine readers and the text of their readings. Thanks!

Jillian Christmas is a queer, afro-caribbean writer living on the unceded territories of the Squamish, Tsleil-Waututh and Musqueam people (Vancouver, BC.) where she served for six years as Artistic Director of Versəs Festival of Words. She has won numerous Grand Poetry-Slam Championship titles and represented Toronto and Vancouver at 11 national poetry festivals, notably breaking ground as the first Canadian to perform on the final stage of the Women of the World Poetry Slam. Jillian's work has been published in a number of magazines and books, most recently Matrix New Queer Writing (issue 98), Plenitude Magazine, Room Magazine (39.1) and celebrated anthology, The Great Black North. Her debut poetry collection The Gospel of Breaking is available now from Arsenal Pulp Press.

Reading text:

(sugar plum)

mommy sat down on the porch to put her foot up. She has so much to tell me today, about the iguana and how it could make aunty run, about the good bush that washes away the bad spirits anyone might put on me. I must take some to charlotteville and bathe with it in the ocean. She tells me too many times about the fish I am already sure I do not want to eat. But I listen. mommy is ninety-nine and she has earned all of her indulgences. So she tells me again about the house she built, how no man helped her do it. When I ask about her mother, she tells me her maiden name was murray. I want to know more about her mother, my great- grandmother. I want to know what she looked like and how she smelled and what she did to stay alive. Was her hair long like mine, was her skin dark like /uncle/?

mommy doesn’t talk much about her mother. Says she liked her mother fine, but she loves her /daddy/. So I listen to her talk about my /great grandfather/ defratis. She tells me he was nice, and fair, with beautiful hair. Half guyanese and half portuguese. She tells me he had plenty money, was a rum dealer with lots of business, rum shops here and there. She tells me how he died at 30 years and how a woman who worked with him told her the story. Some jealous man put poison in his rum so he could steal up all of his business. She asks me if I understand. I do, but as always I have a tough time telling the difference between truth and myth.

Satisfied of my understanding she goes on. She tells me how she loved him. How she cried and threw herself down in the street , just a little girl of five, begging her /father/ not to go to work. She only met him this once, but she loved him her whole life.

When she rolled around and threw a fit to stop him leaving, he reached for his belt, began to unbuckle to lash her into better behaviour, but he stopped himself. Picked her up out of the road and carried her into the store. He told the young woman in there to cook some food and share with her and then he was gone.

mommy says that if her /daddy/ hadn’t died, she would’ve gone with him, travelled to portugal and all over. She says he would’ve left her some money and she wouldn’t have had to work so hard all of her life. Things would’ve been different. She would not have stayed in charlotteville, or married /my grandfather/, (she doesn’t say much about this but I think I already know he was a heavy handed man). I listen. Eventually, in a moment of gratitude, I say that if things had been different I wouldn’t be here, I wouldn’t exist. That’s what I’m telling you, she replies. My gratitude melts into a kind of passive sadness, she has already measured this option, has found it acceptable. I say, but what about your children? I would’ve had different children. She doesn’t say it with malice, but a tepid resignation. I repeat BUT I WOULDN’T EXIST!

No, you wouldn’t be my child. It’s a reasonable compromise for her, a whole life, house, children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren still, gambled on trust for /a man/ only met once, gambled on the kindness of her being fed, instead of beaten.

I think about the longing I have suffered in my life. How I have stretched toward people who would not have stayed even if there were no venom.

The promise of possibility is a trap that has kept me from the joys of my own life.

And what joys am I missing, in clinging to a /daddy/ who is always missing, always walking toward poison and away from food? What love do I dishonour and ignore, in searching for a face I hardly know?

Let them go to their poison /great- grandfathers/ and /daddies/ too. Let them go and leave behind children crying as they will, mourning as we do. Let them go, and let us see what wild plants grow in their absence. What medicines will spring from a line of women with lost fathers and distant /daddies/? A line of maidens and witches who carry their own names and build their own houses, and birth their own bloodlines and cook their own food.

I Miss You Much

I miss you like dark and icy waters miss the warmth of sun’s sweet kisses or lust for the hard hand of wind’s fleeting embraces I miss you like a hungry storm wet and urgent carving torrents through rough and choppy places I miss you deep and aching long and heavy and though you may not heed this truth is by the time you read this I will miss you more already my room is hot the air hangs damp and heady and I miss you I am missing you in places where other lovers’ hands become unsteady at the mention of our skin where others’ sin is weak and thin and other fingers dare not dream to touch come back to me tonight my love I promise I am ready and I miss you much my love MY GOD I miss you much

Lauren Turner is a disabled poet and essayist, who wrote the chapbook, We’re Not Going to Do Better Next Time (knife | fork | book, 2018). Her work has appeared in Grain, Arc Magazine, Poetry is Dead, Cosmonauts Avenue, The Puritan, canthius and elsewhere. She won the 2018 Short Grain Contest and was a finalist for the 2017 3Macs carte blanche Prize. She lives in Tiohtiá:ke/Montréal on the unceded land of the Kanien’kehá:ka Nation.

Reading Text:

excerpt from Stop Bringing Me Here

I want to take the violence out of my life and replace it with a swan pond.

There’s a reading at my alma mater. By attending, I open the nostalgic dam without meaning to, gingerly stepping back into your kitchen.

You have me against the counter, nothing perverse yet – I wanted this.

Onstage, a poet is reciting poems filled with light, weather, and nature.

I hear her animals and I think: How advantageous this woman’s life must be that she can inhabit the pastoral in her poetry.

Do I err as a poet or as a woman? I wasn’t taught to respect either one.

The university reading folds open to a student bar. Presiding over the visiting writers, my former mentor won’t look at me, hasn’t since finding out I’d been involved with you. Gulping my cider like oxygen, I try to visualize sunfish winnowing water into ripples to keep back tears. I want to say: The movements of power aren’t difficult to follow. You weren’t, after all, a rodent tunnelling snow but the cat that pounced in its nest.

Dear [former mentor], Confiding in you felt hazard-filled. I was terrified of blame, the assumption that I tried to capitalize on the power of an older, established man – your friend. Where could he get me?

I never wanted to be gotten anywhere, only to bring myself to the place where he wouldn’t act embarrassed of me. I thought this place existed. If only my appeal wasn’t bound up in the shame he knew to foster.

I trusted you, [former mentor], but you prefer to trust power.

It’s lazy to accuse young women of fucking to the top. Harder to ask why they heard a child’s loon call as love, leapt toward it.

Wait, that metaphor is weak. Turn the child adult, their playtime sinister.

Several men came whistling into my lakeside summer. I swam with them, and that season is no one’s voyeuristic wet dream, except mine.

You upended my life, for a time. I won’t call every fault line pain or pretend we never shared moments that sweetened our brine, making the cuts itch a little less.

Often, those memories carry more pain than your cruelty, that you added value to my life in equal measures to what you took away.

Three years left before I could write that. I’m not sure it’s true.

Moving on didn’t dissuade a part of me from staying entrenched in this. I imagine that’s the part you take issue with. I wonder if you, like my mentor, have recalibrated my culpability to account for your fall.

I didn’t intend to topple you from the pedestal. On TV, a statue in shackles bends like it was never worth admiring and I couldn’t want that for you.

Maybe it was my fault, I tell a friend, trying to hush the sadness that gnaws like the slow hunger of being disbelieved. I should’ve turned him down. Why was I flattered by his interest? Did I believe he was capable of genuine care? How could our relationship grow into anything except a power struggle?

These questions eat beyond their satiation point.

So what, replies society. We’ve all been young and most of us aren’t crying foul about our less savoury trysts. You consented to fucking him and he took it to mean fucking you over. You should’ve been clearer.

I don’t know what I want from this poem. I want to write poems where I’m not dripping across the linoleum with my cunt in your mouth.

It’s a clean request: a plea for poems where birds could take up nest. I needed to talk to you without talking to you, but every line I try goes dead. Let’s take my quiet in handfuls, like a drunken night with too much winter

clothing and it’s always June somewhere.

Fine, have it your way: I never craved his love, only to swallow his prestige with my body, lapping up the Goldschläger cum that clung to the fine mink of his crotch. I was mature in early life and tucked my naïveté up my too-long sleeves. Isn’t that how girls grow up? By pretending we can handle the depths, flaunting our sodden selves like we chose to dive in, rather than hit water from a shove. Swimming is a reflexive motion in ducks. Also in girls.

No matter how softly I cauterize this life, someone asks, But what happened in his kitchen?

It’s my fault. I thought I could enter a man’s home without catching a sliver of his expectation. No, tell me exactly with your bons mots. Spell it out. And what if I can’t, what then? He was nothing I didn’t say yes to.

The men are getting restless, I imagine addressing a lecture hall as I would a horse stable. As if men are no different than beasts broken over centuries, proudly trotted into poetry without fearing their hooves in my stanzas’s soft meat. When they realized I wouldn’t keep quiet, they waited around for me to slip up and write the words they could bridle me with. ::

I am terrified I built my poetry on the backs of violent men. I am terrified. I built my poetry on the backs of violent men.

I am built on the back of violence.

0 notes

soundonreadings · 4 years

Text

Sound On InstaReadings Series Volume 3 with Amber Dawn, Amy Leblanc & Nancy Lee

Welcome to Sound on InstaReadings Series. Our second installment features readers Amber Dawn, Amy Leblanc & Nancy Lee and is hosted by Dina Del Bucchia and David Ly. Posted here for your enjoyment are the bios of our fine readers and the text of their readings. Thanks!

Amber Dawn is the author of five books and the editor of three anthologies. Her sophomore poetry collection, My Art Is Killing Me and Other Poems, launched in March 2020.

Reading text:

fountainhead

Sure, I’ve tossed three pennies over my left shoulder into Trevi

Fountain in Rome, but the mermaid fountain in Piazza Sannazaro

Napoli is my favourite. Napoli is a city of mermaids. I lost count

of mermaids. Two tailed and bathing in cracked frescos. Marble

reliefs carved into arched doorways. Mermaid faces on old coins.

I almost bought myself a tears of Parthenope necklace. A gold

chain hung with two blue teardrop shaped Swarovski crystals.

Parthenope and her sisters swam (or flew, myth shows sirens as half

bird or half fish. Either femme beast works) to Ulysses’ ship to curse

him with their song, but Ulysses tied himself to the mast, stopped

his ears with wax and withstood. The entire crew of men survived

simply by not listening, so the story goes and goes. The defeated

mermaids wept at their failure and filled the bay of Naples.

Parthenope died from the shame and was swept ashore. Her blonde hair

turned to sand and her body, stone. A beach I myself have walked along.

I audibly sobbed before the gorgeous baroque blood of Artemisia

Gentileschi’s famous Judith Slaying Holoferneson, on permanent

display at the Uffizi. A man my father’s age asked me nine

times to leave the gallery with him. One of the only Italian

expressions I know so well that my subconscious has spoken

it back to me in dreams is lasciami stare. It means leave me be.

I drank too much at the strip club in Pescara, Abruzzo as a topless dancer

listed the times homophobia nearly killed her. I understood her perfectly

when she asked what Canada is like. Is there libertà per lesbi in Canada?

I furiously recorded the words that I misunderstood in a notebook

as if I might one day retroactively follow meaning. I couldn’t call

upon language fast enough to console her in real time. I couldn’t say

fuck this shit, I’m sorry or chin up, tits out, you know or you

deserve better, femme. I’ve come to associate speaking half a language

or less than half, a tender handful of comprehension, with being

a survivor of sexual violence. My body has breath and spasm where it

should have words. My body can picture ease and desire, but is forever

learning how to say what it wants. I’ve spent a humbple lifetime looking

for others who labour to live inside their skin My kink is to loudly love those

who’ve been told to keep quiet. Erotic boom. I want outlaster’s love. Against-

all-odds love. I, finally, want myself, and slick fluency in this desire.

While in Napoli I wrongly read a museum label to say that Parthenope

wished to marry Circe the sorceress. I read queer determination, and imagine

how that beach might feel if my mistranslation was an origin story.

Image if the grounds we walk were build from queer love? What song

would our queer scion sing six thousand years from now? What shape

would story take? If our bodies were fluid loose, waxy and loud

and fluent in our madrelingue, in a kin spit, in the looped vernaculars

we have long deserved, then imagine what words we’d know so well

that even our subconscious could speak this love back to us in our dreams

tragic interview

An anagram for “creative writing” is “tragic interview”

We will ask you if it is true

We will ask you how true it is

We will ask you where you’re from

We will ask you to verify you belong

We will ask you about vice and god

We will ask you to legitimize blood

We will ask for a pathos worthy childhood

We will ask you about your thronged body

We will ask why you inhabit both and many

We will ask if your kin tolerates such veracity

We will ask if you’ve told the whole story

We will ask if you are attracted to danger

We will ask you if your shame overlingers

We will ask for trauma to be in past tense

We will ask you to narratively arc triumph

We will ask you to lip service progress

We will ask you about free speech

We will ask to contract your name

We will ask you to trouble in stereotypes

We will ask you stroke those fleshy ethics

We will ask how outsiders may write about you

We will ask you for your blanket endorsement

We will ask you wax widespread as hot and now

We will ask you attest to your own exceptionalism

We will ask to couch your fine ass in the theoretical

We will ask you to table round with your enemies

We will ask that you prove pain makes great art

We will ask you to represent en masse

We will ask you to do it for less

We will ask for your free consultation

We will ask you to recommend your own

We will ask where do you find the time

We will ask you to exalt your labour

We will ask if your success is a surprise

We will ask if you’re surprised to be alive

We will ask you to front face as the hero

We will ask you exhibit the future possible

We will ask how the next gen will fathom and ken

We will ask for a kind offering to the institution

We will ask you for the ever positive spin

We will ask you cleave homage and imitation

We will ask your craft for credible dimension

We will ask if the work appears to be uneven

We will ask you to trial your live version

We will ask you how true it is

We will ask you if it is true

Dear IncorrectName: found and redacted from my inbox

Please allow me to introduce myself as the OfficialTitle at the College_University_ GovernmentFundedInstitution. At my InstitutionalPlaceOfEmployment we are Studying_OtheringtheLivingHellOutof Prostitution in Canada_FeministViews on Prostitution_ProstitutionExploitationTrafficking_and other topics related to your “hellish existence.”

Your book How Poetry Saved My Life is on my students’ critical book review list alongside TextsbyFeministsWhoHateYou and UnethicalResearchers. I feel strong- ly that your perspective would contribute to my students’ learning. Sorry for the ridiculously late notice, but I want to invite you to visit our class next Friday. I do not have funds for guest speakers, but I would be happy to offer a $50 honorarium from my own SalarythatIsFourTimesWhatyouEarnedLastYear and parking permit for the day. Please let me know if this would work for you.

Dear IncorrectName

I am writing on behalf of the AcademicConferenceWithA$200+FeePerAttendee. Part of this year’s goal is to include a performance “cabaret” [erroneous use of quotation marks for reasons unknown] that will feature any or all varieties of literary performance (spoken word, performance poetry, slam poetry, sound poetry, etc) with a focus on the voices of diverse populations.

Your presence at this “cabaret” would be of great value to the conference attendees in their role as AnalyticalOnlookers.

I have heard back from the PlanningCommittee regarding finances and what we can offer you is a BelowStandardArtistFee honorarium, but we are tight so__could you accept a conference pass? We have several other authors who are only getting conference passes. So paying you is a bit of a “double standard” [substantiated use of quotation marks] and there might be hard feelings.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Dear IncorrectName

WeAreOtherArtists. We’d love if you would come to OurSHOW and read your work_talk about your work_talk about your life_talk about the state of our community_talk about doing work in community. No hard hitting talk_just talk talk_casual talk. You would be fabulous. Our stage is yours for one hour. We expect around 150 guests.

This is your opportunity to reach a large crowd.

We don’t offer you an appearance fee, but you will see OurVision is VeryInnovative.

Dear Amber Dawn I am a Writer_Artist_BodyThatisHoldingStory.

I have always loved &admired your work &it would be an honour to have your feedback. It would be awesome if you could read my ScriptCollectionNovelOutlineTreatise &give me some honest &brutal feedback. Read it whenever you want! I hope I see you in person soon! I can come by your office. Do you still work at ArtsCommunityJob_ FrontLineSupport_DropIn_HeathCentre_CollegeUniversity?

I am HoldingaStory &it is PAINFUL. How did you write your first book?

I have always wanted to be a writer.

Did it feel like a relief to get that first book out?

How do you read in front of all those people &do interviews &does your mom

still speak to you? I’m afraid of my parents &hometown &people

I used to know &MySurvivorsStory &what

people will think if I SpeakMyTruth.

What do you like about being a writer

Amy LeBlanc is an MA student in English Literature and creative writing at the University of Calgary. She is currently non-fiction editor at filling Station magazine and will be assuming the role of Managing Editor in July. She is the author of three books: her debut poetry collection, I know something you don’t know, was published with Gordon Hill Press in March 2020. Her novella, Unlocking, will be published by the UCalgary Press in 2021. Pedlar Press will publish her short story collection, Homebodies, in 2022. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Room, PRISM International, EVENT, Prairie Fire, CV2, and the Literary Review of Canada among others. She was recently a finalist for the Minola Review Inaugural Fiction Contest judged by Heather O’Neill.

Reading Text:

Wintering

He torched the skin that I’m still in.

Counting Januarys—

I hold my hair

to sing psalms

and semi vowels.

The wasps bloat with

my belly in December,

gashing panty lines

and pot holes.

The burnt space will tear from my hips.

I am a calamity

asking for armistice.

The storied life of Grace Poole

She dangled striated

scarves from the window

rattling her head as I

held her waist.

He told me to keep her

quiet, to keep her safe, compliant—

this significant

paranoia

that she might be

vaulting

purging

dancing

like red fiber from rafters.

She tells me

my hair reminds her

of a fox. My brush is

a signal to enemy lines:

her lips parting

on a stolen glass

of honey soaked wine.

She and I

watch the tree,

as it splits and succumbs

in the orchard, a slit

where the tree was licked

with a voltage charged tongue.

She says that it will never

be the same again.

We are both behind

the lock and chain, but

I can abscond

to the halls and gates.

She lingers behind

the latch—

her fingers

entwined in a lock

of my red hair.

We are curious bedfellows

with sweetness on our thighs,

the topographical curving

of bones and banks.

She is hers and I am mine.

I will never ask

for more than the chill

of her hands that cool me

until I drown.

She won’t jump with someone

to hush the light.

Girls reading in red coats

– For Paula Jean Welden

She tucked a book

into the folds of her red coat

when she left her room.

She felt the spine against her ribs,

and the edges of paper wrapping

around her skin:

a pair of legs in a claw foot tub

a little birth with a belly full of rocks.

The book would last her

the better part of three days.

She buttoned a scarf to her throat

and picked bloodroot and ate carrots,

nine almonds a day with a glass of water.

She expected to wander and to find an altar

in the trees, in the wasps, in moist roots

and the mud that caught her heels.

She freed insects from jars that never held water

and heard a rattling sound

in her bone marrow,

in her ears eyes hands and teeth.

They searched and searched,

but she stayed hidden at her altar

or the meeting point

of her own sternum and her spine.

She read her book

in her red buttoned coat.

She thought about ivy

and garden walls,

moths that bleed cyanide,

women in turtlenecks,

wine and cake and uncomfortable pantyhose.

Her coat, red as pomegranate seeds

trailed behind her, moist and well-watered.

Her exposed belly could cut open letters

and bloodroot was the bedrock of her spine.

Her book had moistened in the rain,

so she made an herbarium

and slept in the vines.

Stripping the moths of their poison,

she dripped them over a porringer

and encouraged them to dry.

When her fingernails rooted to the paper,

she swallowed herself whole.

The brief reincarnation of Mary Webster on the Amtrak from Boston to New York

Leaves clung to the woman’s shoe 

and hair hung from the sides of her face.

It had rained for a week.

She’d eaten a biscuit, 

then fell asleep on the train

to the hissing until the low whistle sang.

The man across the aisle

was watching her sleep.

He pretended to read his newspaper

licked his inked fingers, 

smudged editorials, blurred black

and white photos with spit on his hands.

She dreamt about being a cat, a fox,

an apple hanging from a tree.

She opened her eyes and found 

the man had moved to sit beside her.

He’d been so silent, 

she’d hardly felt the air move.

He held out a cigarette 

which she placed between her lips.

When his hand shifted closer to her hip,

she put her bag between them 

and asked if he had ever played scrabble:

He played cart, 

she played cruel, 

he played slick,

she played sway, 

he played cyan, 

she won by adding an i and a d and an e.

She sent him back to his side

of the train with a biscuit

wrapped in a napkin

and a half-drunk mug of tea.

She returned to her dream of the hanging fruit,

felt her small body sway in the breeze

until the train arrived in New York.

Hereafter

He says that she’s unattractive, but the subtext is that he doesn’t like girls who are more comfortable in their skin than he is

with his masculinity. He made me realize I can stop apologizing to the mannequins I run into—stop slipping confession notes into the books

I read for whomever needs them after me. I don’t apologize to the boy who left his gum between my knees, because my arteries continue

to pump and my feet fit into my shoes without him. The amassment of buildings and bodies and dealmakers and white men tells me that I don’t

need to rip eyelashes out for wishes. I’ve learned that the squeaky wheel gets taken away. The arbiter of wineries, golf clubs, mortgages,

window frames, casinos, finds that these are grasping at the ceiling, fingers spread into spider webs. In this bottom-less wanting,

unnecessary roughness earns you a slap on the shoulder and an extra hour of locker room talk. We learn to grab back (if sex happens before

you wanted it) with chemicals between our fingers. I burn my throat on oatmeal and my skin turns to scales– my pages are dog-eared

from turning corners too soon. In this one hundred and forty character locale, I’ll blast out a constant reminder that

this mimeograph heart won’t be stopping any time soon.

Nancy Lee is the author of two critically acclaimed works of fiction, Dead Girls and The Age, and a new poetry collection, What Hurts Going Down (McClelland & Stewart). Her poems have recently appeared in Ploughshares, The Adroit Journal, The Puritan, Arc Poetry Magazine and The Malahat Review. She teaches at the University of British Columbia and lives in Steveston, BC with her husband, the author John Vigna, and their jerk of a dog, Rudy the cardigan welsh corgi.

Reading Text:

four-eyed girls

I’m sitting at the bar with Mary Katherine Gallagher watching prospects grind hope into anything blond.

I’ve peeled off wool tights so my pleated skirt flashes white cotton panties when I cross and uncross. No one notices.

For fun, we switch eyeglasses. In hers, I drown. Fish wriggle and shimmer, groove beyond my reach. She says,

Through these glasses everyone looks thinner. She says, Why aren’t there more girls like us in movies? I tell her

there are plenty, floating in rivers, folded in dumpsters, naked, nameless. She says, It’s time for another shooter.

Something to clean the sink, something the bartender will set on fire, something that hurts going down.

no place for a heart

Start a fire with women’s bodies; stack them deep for heat. What keeps a kind girl alive in the wild? The men in town are crapshoots, sawbucks, coins striking heads and tails. They post naked snaps of her on 4chan, ferry fifteen-year- olds across state lines, weigh options like: hands up her skirt, hands around her throat. She’s ready for a chorus of frogs, a convent timeshare, ready to train a dildo to mow the lawn. Abandon romance. This one’s for mothers who catch their boyfriends fingering their daughters. Here’s to bff date rape in the old man’s sedan. Today a high school football coach showed cheerleaders the glory of his half- hard penis in a hot dog bun, tomorrow a man will cram his wife into a Naugahyde suitcase and drag her to the river. It’s so fucking hot inside; she isn’t surprised.

alphas

i. At three a.m., lip gloss and crop tops wasted in empty clubs, only you are brave enough for new terrain. We hunt at a crawl, every gin joint gated, marquee dim. On the boulevard, we roll down windows to watch a coyote lope, head bowed. A bloody rabbit swings from his jaw. I tell you he’s my first.

ii. Alphas beside the car. Caps pulled, track suits baggy, shoulders rolling, chests sunk, a lazy jog with beer cans, sidewalk be damned. The pack must get hungry at three a.m. They stare through glass, blow their liquored smoke. I say, Ask where they’re going. You shake your head. The night is wild with them.

iii. Once, in a town on the coast you chose celibacy over the hazard of ocean men, woodsmen, mountain men, unwashed hair in pelts. Men with thick paws, bark faces, who stank of wood chip, coal dust, fish. When they entered your bed tangled in nets and splinters snuffled wet muzzles to your neck, you played dead.

iv. Now you raise two hatchlings in a sanctuary. You pound fence posts, lay tripwire, stock bear bangs, kneel at the water to check muddy ground for tracks. Satellites beam our hushed talk of coyotes, mangy middle-aged cheeks, half-eaten carcasses, how they chew old wounds, cut and run. We forget their feral cologne, teeth and charm, until they startle us from the stupor of married sleep.

daughters

i. Tell the daughters we were heartless, crouched behind trees with rusted wire. That flanks bucked as we bled the bodies on beds of pine, stabbed with flint blades and the ends of spoons from a grandmother’s hope chest. Eyes whaled white, pupils drained of ink. One by one in the fog of morning, we scrubbed them from our petticoats.

ii. Stretched and sticky in the sourdough starter, shovels scraping the stable floor, scouring water in the tin tub, sewing flecked with blood. A childhood bridled, saddled, stung with lye, hung to cure in salt and sun. No one believed what their eyes didn’t see, what gnawed through a girl, rustled her work-worn body in the brush.

iii. Did they even want daughters? Sons so adored, rut-hungry, bottle-weak, sloppy work with a scythe. Who didn’t know his charm, the lanolin musk of his wool? And what if all daughters turned to ghosts? Whale bone, sadness, smoke. Tell them, it was kill or be killed. Tell them, we shivered for days beside their cribs, then stood to answer our own prayers.

wife at the end of the world

Fever on the streets as our planet swings closer to the sun, as ocean levels rise, biohazard atomizes, nuclear runoff seeps. Lives mundane

with disaster. At the store, we snipe over which canned soup has more nutrition, chunky or creamy, which shattered pack of crackers

has mice. A stock boy with peeling palms counts water bottles, while outside, men in lab coats debate timelines of extinction.

I climb into a shelf for the last box of oats, and a woman in full makeup, French twist, purse dangling from a charmed wrist, stretches

on tanned legs to help my husband reach a can of waxed beans. Her fingers pulse his biceps. His eyes finish her like a meal.

My T-shirt smells of dead guinea pig, and I wish for one last bolt of catastrophe: a fissure, a sinkhole in the dry goods aisle.

So that weeks from now, it will be my hair unravelled, flecked with debris, my ash-smeared skin in a strappy slip as I lie beside a naked man

whose name I do not ask. Too busy tracking diseased dogs with my night scope and rifle, too busy brewing carboys of anti-toxin,

wielding my flamethrower against mutant spiders, too busy calculating orbit-altering supernovas to settle for repopulating the earth.

0 notes

soundonreadings · 4 years

Text

Sound On InstaReadings Series Volume 2 with John Elizabeth Stintzi & Kyla Jamieson

Welcome to Sound on InstaReadings Series. Our second installment features readers John Elizabeth Stintzi and Kyla Jamieson and is hosted by Dina Del Bucchia. Posted here for your enjoyment are the bios of our fine readers and the text of their readings. Thanks!

John Elizabeth Stintzi is the recipient of the 2019 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers, and their work has appeared in the Malahat Review, the Fiddlehead, Kenyon Review, and Ploughshares. They are the author of the novel Vanishing Monuments as well as the poetry collection Junebat.

Excerpt from John Elizabeth Stintzi’s VANISHING MONUMENTS (for SOUND ON, April 24):

The concrete path, the door, the hallway. The house. I remember Mother stuffing me into down jackets and snow boots, hobbling me into the thick snow pants she’d bought for me at the thrift store.

“I bought it big like this because you will grow,” Mother said when she first pulled them up my legs as I sat braced on the stairs.

It was late October, which back then meant there was already a foot of snow in Winnipeg, and the rivers were frozen. It was morning. I don’t know where we were going. She’d bought me the pants with a too-big jacket because I’d outgrown the one-piece snowsuit I’d used for the last few years. I must have been around eight or nine. She rolled up the legs, took an open safety pin from between her lips, and started pinning up the rolls of extra length.

“If you buy big clothes, your body will know to grow into them. Do you want to be big one day, Alani? Like me.”

I don’t remember answering, but I must have, because that was back when Mother and I still responded to each other. My mind doesn’t usually decide to remind me of us speaking. Instead, I remember thinking about my body getting larger, as she pinned the legs, and how hopeful that made me. I wanted there to be more room for all of me, I wanted my body to feel as bare and roomy as our house did, like I could fit everything in. When I was in kindergarten, because it was too cold to have recess outside, our teacher brought out the projector to show us a documentary about hermit crabs. I couldn’t understand what the voice-over was saying because of its speed and accent, so I just watched the crabs switching shells and started to think that’s what life is like: you live as long as you can in one body, then once you can’t fit into it anymore, you move to a new one. And someone smaller takes your place.

For a while, I didn’t understand what growing up looked like, didn’t know how it worked. For a few years after Ilsa died and gave Mother the house in her will, Mother helped other elderly people in the neighbourhood keep up their lives in their own homes. Over the years of looking after Ilsa and me, she had perfected her technique of caring for fragile bodies.

Before I was in school, or during the summer, I went along with her in the mornings and wandered around the old person’s house while Mother was in another room, helping them get out of bed, bathe, eat, or take their medicine. I spent most of the time there either avoiding their mean old pets or walking around their living rooms, their hall- ways, looking at the family pictures on the walls. I remember looking through those photos for the old, frail things that Mother cared for and never once finding them.

I never thought that they could’ve been the result of one of the young bodies in those photos. After a certain age they stopped being documented, or else the newer photos were never hung. Mother hadn’t ever taught me about aging, about time’s effect on a body. I’d never seen a picture of myself as a baby; I don’t know that I’d ever seen a picture of myself at all back then. I thought that everything was inside me, that as far back as I could remember was as far back as I ever was. I assumed the people in the photos, in different stages of their lives, were each a different person. I thought I was going to be myself—a child—forever.

Nobody told me that I’d already been things that I didn’t remember, that as far back as I could recall was not the start of me, and that my life would consist of slowly leaving myself behind. I hadn’t yet realized that I didn’t remember anything about the year or two we still lived in Germany. All I’d known was that whenever I looked at myself in the mirror, there I was. Back then, with that mindset, things seemed stable.

“What does it mean being big?” I asked, as Mother took my hands and pulled me to my feet at the bottom of the stairs. She tugged at the pants, put her eye close to the floor—her tied-back hair flopping onto the hardwood—to squint and yank at the pinned legs. By then, I knew people grew, that there was no escaping the body I was in. “Why do I want to do it?”

She sat up—the memory is tack sharp—finished adjusting one of the straps of the snow pants, pulled back a little, and looked me straight in the eyes. Her face was so close to mine. I can remember the smell of her shampoo, the weight of the snow pants hanging on my shoulders, her hands grazing down along them on their way to brace her against the floor with that swooshing sound of scraped polyester. I remember everything about that moment, everything but her mouth. I want to remember her smiling, but I can’t see it. I can’t see her mouth or the inflection that the words came out with.

“Because it is going to happen, Alani. Getting big. You should be welcoming and excited for things that are going to happen.”

* Kyla Jamieson is a disabled writer who lives and relies on the unceded traditional territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Room Magazine, Poetry Is Dead, Arc Poetry Magazine, Vallum, Peach Mag, Plenitude, GUTS, and The Account. She is the author of Kind of Animal (Rahila’s Ghost Press), a poetry chapbook about the aftermath of a brain injury. Her work was longlisted for the 2019 CBC Poetry Prize and her first book-length collection of poems, Body Count (Nightwood Editions), placed third in the Metatron Prize for Rising Authors. Find Kyla on Instagram as @airymeantime or at www.kylajamieson.com.

BODY COUNT like every intelligent (traumatized) woman full of self-hate (shame) I have always been a perfectionist / before I wanted to be pretty I wanted to be on time / most improved most present best /my high school history teacher emphasized obedience / everyone I talk to remembers him fondly idk why / I researched the rape of nanjing / my paper was a failure / nobody really knew how many people died there / I couldn’t establish the simplest facts / it was hopeless / I forgot I asked for an apology from the prof people say I got fired like that’s what I wanted & not his respect / can writing be healing without inviting mockery? / according to google george orwell said journalism is what somebody doesn’t want printed & everything else is just pr / lately I worry the poetry I like is just pr / I wonder about the carbon emissions of a body’s decomposition / like is killing yourself better for the planet / anorexia runs in my family / studies associate it with trauma & perfectionism / I used to think I could trade obedience for safety / I rewrote my paper on gallipoli / I got an a / white history is easy / internment is only two letters from internet / that’s where I read they put us in horse stalls / my great-grandfather said I have three boys & we’re all willing to work / they were sent to a farm instead of a camp / fyi japanese soldiers raped nanjing / fyi it doesn’t matter how perfect you are / tl;dr I tried to be perfect for a long time & it didn’t keep me safe / today I went in the shower & shaved for so long my calluses fell off / I don’t like what this might be seen as saying about my politics like maybe I’m secretly as misogynistic as that man who’s in love with his sex doll as well as his sex doll side piece / but it made me feel so clean

I AM SO EXCITED ABOUT THE FUTURE SINCE MY ONLY LIMITS ARE IMAGINED

there is artificial grass here but that’s not what i’ve been smoking like all great millennial visionaries i am caving under the weight of my ambitions my grandma says life is a gimmick i google virgin-whore dichotomy plus intellectual how to define evil without capitalism what even is normal how valuable optometrists will be during the apocalypse i am not ready for the unending applause at that one point in trump’s address to congress was gruesome when will i see you again

EXCEPTING MY INFIRMITIES

concussed I land bed & sleep my belly is hot like heat I wear my fingernails are getting along the smiley face’s mouth corners drip condensation I dream of rivers & apocalypse opium in the dark & fear silverfish I want to write a chopped book in series voice jess sends smiling pile of poo I say to you little brother I can go to america on the internet

WBU?

I’m on Bumble & people are asking what I do for fun. How to explain no free will for a year, each day shaped by however pain appeared that morning?

I NEED A POEM

Can we talk about the moon tonight? Low & full in the baby-blue sky. A friend at my door, the sound of her laugh & well-loved heart. I want to be held up like that. I need a poem about happiness I haven’t written yet, an ode to the ducks in my neighbours’ pool, another for the pink magnolias of spring—some trees make it look so easy: yes, I can hold all this beauty up.

0 notes

soundonreadings · 4 years

Text

Sound On InstaReadings Series Volume 1 with David Ly & Corinne Manning

Welcome to Sound on InstaReadings Series. Our first installment features readers David Ly and Corinne Manning and is hosted by Dina Del Bucchia. Posted here for your enjoyment are the bios of our fine readers and the text of their readings. Thanks! Corinne Manning is a prose writer and literary organizer. Their stories and essays have been published widely, including in Toward an Ethics of Activism and Shadow Map: An Anthology of Survivors of Sexual Assault. Corinne founded The James Franco Review, a project that sought to address implicit bias in the publishing industry. Their debut short story collection We Had No Rules is out with Arsenal Pulp Press this spring.

Ninety Days

“Were you having trouble breathing last night or something?” It was early. Denise and I were still in bed. I gave a little half shrug that I often thought was adorable, but there was no indication that it was received that way. I tried to stop looking cute and speak in an adult-sounding voice—not the childlike voice I habitually used with Denise.

“Not that I noticed. Why?”

Denise sat up and pulled on a T-shirt. I watched breasts disappear and was disappointed, even though those breasts had become like strangers to me. For the past year, in addition to avoiding pronouns, or using “they” instead of “he” or “she,” Denise had asked me to pretend they—the breasts in this case—didn’t exist, to not touch them anymore, to not sexualize them, because they were confusing. I obeyed because I loved and respected Denise, and also because it felt sexy to have something that I couldn’t do. But by putting that shirt on, Denise had shut the door to sex.

“You were doing that thing where you kind of chortle and breathe through your mouth again. It sounds like you’re choking.” They slammed the covers to the side and roughly got out of bed, and in the process their fist sort of hit my hip bone. It hurt a little, but I decided not to feel it since Denise hadn’t noticed they’d done anything.

“Sorry about that,” I said. I put on a T-shirt and covered my own breasts, aware that no one was sad to see them go. At the end of the bed, Denise stopped moving abruptly.

“I can’t imagine living with that sound for the rest of my life.” There was no sense of remorse in that face, probably because it was so full of truth. I do make a weird sound at night, and what I wasn’t brave enough to ask Denise was: Isn’t it worse during the day when my nose makes a fairly regular whistle on my exhale? When I came out at twenty-one, my mom—overcome by shock or rage or what she thought she was supposed to do—popped me quickly in the nose. A snap of the wrist. And I remember that as I covered my face, her hands went to her mouth. She let out one sob, then

said, “I don’t know why I did that. I’m totally fine with this.”

“Do you want to help pay for a surgery to fix it?” I asked.

“I got my own body to worry about,” Denise said sharply, and it was so early in the morning, it sounded like a shout. I slipped out of bed and stood on my tiptoes. I was expecting a long fight, and I wanted us to be on equal footing. I wanted Denise to look into my eyes, which didn’t happen. In an instant, Denise broke up with me.

“I’ve been thinking about this for a while,” they said.

“But I haven’t.” We let that statement in its powerlessness hang in the air before it dissolved under the high-pitched hiss that escaped my nose, which I wished I could tear off and throw at Denise, who wouldn’t even talk to me. They said I was being petty—wanting closure, wanting an explanation. It was capitalist, they said, of

me to want a reason. Denise had this ability to be so stoic no matter how upset I got.

I screamed, “What do I need to do to get you to respond to me? Do I need to, like, shit right here in front of you? Right on the rug? Like an animal?” I moved like I was going to pull my pants down, and even though Denise was looking at me, it wasn’t like they were seeing me.

Obviously, I didn’t do it.

Denise’s best friend, Del, came by with a truck and by the evening had carted them and all their things away. The last bit of communication I received was a postcard (a

picture of our town’s waterfront) asking me not to reach out. Denise said we needed to take ninety days of no contact. The only soft thing written on this card was that they thought the ninety days would help me let go and heal.

The pronoun thing wasn’t that hard for me. But what’s hard about telling this story, with using “they” right now, is that it puts Denise even further away from me. That sense of plurality, that singular they, asserts that Denise doesn’t belong to me anymore and never did. This is capitalist. I know this.

I’m sensitive about being recognized as queer or radical. As someone assigned female at birth who presents as femme I have to make a series of conscious decisions to be visible as queer, and I still have to come out, multiple times a day. So I don’t just wear the barrette, I attach the turquoise giraffe-shaped fascinator and smudge my mascara. Once, just to go to the coffee shop, I spent hours working my hair into a beehive. I wrap fur around my shoulders in the grocery store. I flirt with all the butches and the studs and the ones who prefer to be called masculine-of-centre, even when I don’t really want them, because there is little that is more satisfying than watching another queer’s shoulders soften as they smile at me excitedly in that open-mouthed way once they know.

David Ly is the author of Mythical Man (Anstruther Books, 2020) and the chapbook Stubble Burn (Anstruther Press, 2018). His poems have appeared in Plenitude, The /temz/ Review, PRISM and others. He is the Poetry Editor of This Magazine and sits on the Editorial Collective of Anstruther Press.

Evil

is a warm tongue on a first date

Evil smells like grass that shouldn’t be cut

an over-chlorinated pool

Evil sweats

while sleeping through the day as its pills expire

wakes to be danced

through the night as if it were a demigod

Evil feels like a chain link fence pressing into shoulder blades

Evil bites your bottom lip

leaves you standing at dusk raging and swearing that you won’t give in

but the craving for it comes on like an orgasm

Evil eats you out when you should be looking for a cure

Evil takes your virginity

with the beat dropping in the song you forgot was playing in the background

it honeys sweet tea the morning after

drinks it in front of you

Evil won’t break eye contact

says it’s just the way I’ve always been

leaving its shirts in your drawer

blaming its confusion and crying

can’t deal, can’t deal, can’t deal

Evil knows it will always exist

that you’ll always come back to it

it stares into your feeble will while you imagine it

French kissing new lovers

Where Are You Really From?

Sent to ESL class in fifth grade

Went home to finish Harry Potter on the loveseat

Told to learn about the Irish potato famine through an early-readers book

Read about red-eared slider turtles in bed out of curiosity

Failed math tests to everyone’s surprise

Finished spelling tests the quickest

Memories recalled because they cease to mummify

Ice melts in the champagne bucket while he waits

Mythical Man (II)

We press against each other

so hard

that I should just admit

I want to be

absorbed into you,

our atoms

amalgamating

until we become a hydra

writhing

with one hundred hissing

heads poised

to strike.

But the harder I try

to inhabit this idea

the more I know

of its futility –

eventually, each head

will be sliced off,

tar-black blood

kissing the hilt

of my sword.

I’ll need to cauterize

each wound

to prevent

our dreams

from regrowing,

distractions

from the real magic

that make us

powerful

on our own.

Hunt

Have you noticed how sharp and sparkly

your talons are in the starlight?

Let me lick them clean once you’ve finished

stirring up my sweetest and most tender parts.

Pupils dilated, I see hunters

who’ve been stalking this forest for you

the moment you entered to seek me out.

Clutch me in the dark – together we’ll stay

silent as I brush the vertebrae

protruding from your charcoal-flecked skin.

Finally

The salt on your cheeks

needs to be wiped away. To be honest,

the devil should not be remembered

only when he wants to be.

He’s there when you slip, lacerating

the bottoms of your toes

on barnacles, and he’s there

when you slurp back ice-cold oysters

on the shoreline, golden and hot

with citrus

running down your stubbled chin,

speckling the sand’s darkness.

Before you leave, be sure to stand

and limp over if you have to.

Find where the devil stands

in the water, a wading merman

from the waist up. He’ll bow,

patient and understanding,

forgiving and waiting

to kiss the tears from your cheeks.

0 notes