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    CNQ

    Three Poems
    by Catriona Wright

    0
    By CNQ Team on October 3, 2017 Poetry

    Honeymoon

    Iceland’s July is all days. The sky never dims
    below a milky grey. Days of blue
    mussels served on slabs of polished slate, tourist-
    tiny rotten shark cubes chased with birch sap cocktails.

    In wool sweaters, black sand grouting our boot soles,
    we leave our rented apartment for the grocery store.
    Slopes and winking dots float above vowels, an accessorized
    and uncanny alphabet. Bog-brown lamb’s heads
    wrapped in cellophane, speckled puffin eggs, cod
    livers in tins, thin dried puddles of fish, like dehydrated ghosts.

    Strolling through the aisles, we adjust. The carts smaller,
    the bottles of coke smaller, but the same familiar blast
    of rotisserie chicken, familiar florescent lights
    blanching skin, familiar sugars and fats
    stacked by the cash, goading our impulse control.

    We bicker our favourite bicker over the relative
    nutritional merits of broccoli versus kale versus bean sprout,
    agree we both married an idiot, then fill our basket
    with farfalle, leeks, smoked salmon, passive soft
    cheese. Our food beeps. We pay and leave.

    The air tastes sulfurous, the island too young to insulate
    all that heat we know, but often forget, is boiling
    beneath our feet. We discuss our plans for the evening:
    the food, the dishes, and then Dream Wife,
    an all-girl band we will scream along to for the next decade.

     

    Casseroles, or, Delicacy in Small Town America

    Stunned mourners crowd the kitchen, bearing
    casseroles dense with salt and fat and childhood
    dreams. Green beans suspended in cream
    of mushroom soup. Yams smashed and studded
    with pastel marshmallows. Pork goulash, meatballs,
    cheesy broccoli. Bread crumbs browned, onions
    crisp. You eat together in booze-leavened
    near silence. Your mind stumbles through half-

    remembered rituals. Long ago, in Ireland, a sin eater
    unburdened the departed soul by supping on bread
    newly risen on the corpse’s chest, yeast
    replacing those last breaths. Or, no, maybe in Hungary
    everyone shared the loaf, perhaps sweetened
    with dried plums or ginger, absorbing not the faults
    but the social grace or humility of the deceased?

    The food wouldn’t have mattered to him.
    He saw no difference between a hotdog
    stuffed crust pizza and a lobster
    and caviar puff and a smoothie rough
    with chalky powders. Eating the simplest
    way to stay alive, not as it is for you, a spell
    summoning scratchy sweaters, the smell of stone
    and fire, late November aimlessness – and now

    this loss added to that soft blur. Somehow
    the day ends. A plate of congealed scoops
    wrapped in plastic left at his place. Guests
    given souvenirs, shortbread biscuits speckled
    with caraway seeds as dark as the beard
    trimmings you grumbled over every morning
    when you found them scattered in the sink.

     

    Instinct
    after Delmore Schwartz

    I’m not a sloppily stoppered howl,
    not a bear in heat trampling ferns for a world of candy
    and rage sex. No, I paid someone to siphon the venom
    from my ovaries, to destink my pits. The doctor assured me
    it was routine surgery, just a few clean snips
    to guarantee I won’t be tempted to devour
    my young. It’s over. It’s so over. It’s been over
    seven years since that animal-ectomy.

    But I’m still haunted by the beast I might have become.
    Sometimes, I dream of potent dung, of crashing
    with pure terror through the slippery and scorn-
    fueled city. I dream of feathery antennae combing the air
    for mates, of tentacles surging from my chest.
    I dream I’m a sheep degrading myself for pellets, an all-knees lamb
    falling slickly out of me. I awake screaming,
    a hand pressed between my legs.

    I chase those musky women who rejected the doctor’s advice,
    those who never tamped down their ribbits
    and warbles, those with tails and stench and an endless amoral hunger,
    those who will drag their tumorous bodies into the desert
    to die. I sit next to them at parties. I want to feel my skin
    scraping off on their rough tongues. I want to suckle, to be stung.
    I corner them and jabber praise. They ignore me,
    but I can’t stop myself.

    —From CNQ 99, the Film Issue (Spring 2017)

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