Ashley-Elizabeth Best, Bad Weather Mammals

 

Sweet Sixteen

Mum said I had to call Dad to find out where he was.
I didn’t want to think about the day he would stop
coming around, the fist of his mouth. My mother was
always attempting to reassure herself by reassuring me.
She promised we would go to the funeral together; all of her
little foxes in the same part of the forest. Before the funeral
we walked into a field as a cast of hawks stroked a November
morning into a gaslit day. Time measures itself in a scatter
like those hawks. My social worker says I can be the axe
to break through the hold of my own misery. I’m learning
to be invisible, but these hands refuse to lift the axe.
Mum knew how to make me jimmy her heart loose.
She could be gentle then, whispering tunes her grandfather
left tucked behind her ears. I am learning what is not mine to tell.
I am not as free as I would like to be.

Kingston, Ontario poet Ashley-Elizabeth Best’s latest full-length poetry collection is Bad Weather Mammals (Toronto ON: ECW Press, 2024), a follow-up to her full-length debut, Slow States of Collapse (ECW Press, 2016). Bad Weather Mammals explores illness, depression, trauma, disability poetics, and a history of violence; working through and across an array of ongoing and lingering, old and new, challenges across a first-person lyric. To open the poem “Good Sick/Bad Sick,” she writes: “The sick should be good. / It is a kind of undoing.” As the back cover offers, the collection “navigates the devastations and joys of living in a disabled and traumatized body. By taking a backward glance, Best traces how growing up under the maladaptive bureaucracy of social services with a single disabled mother and five younger siblings led her to a precarious future in which she is also disabled and living on social assistance.” Opening the collection, the prose-poem “Chapter of Accidents” sets the tone, introducing all that might follow: “I am thirty years old and this is the first year of my life I have lived in an apartment that did not have a mould problem, that did not have a man problem, that did not have a man with fists in your face problem.” This is what one needs to know before she begins, before she moves further back to where she had been, compared to where she is now. Further on in the same piece:

Disability meant housewife, meant I do everything else and he makes the money. Eleven years of water-bloated walls, mould an encroaching boundary of black on the carpet. It didn’t take much to lay my mood flat then, for the dishes to coalesce into a pile of grime that neither of us wanted to deal with, until he decided it was my responsibility. Oh, what of my joints, the sullen pop of knees as they straighten the body. Tender points signal illness, swollen knees require needles to release the fluid. I flattened myself, expanded despite my desire to thin into invisibility.

The poems in and across Bad Weather Mammals represents an unfolding, an unfurling, of reclaimed and repurposed self, despite and through whatever else had been, has come and still is. “Bronwen suggested the body / is the limit we must learn to love.” she writes, to open the poem “I Am Becoming a House,” a poem which suggests a reference to the late Kingston poet Bronwen Wallace (1945-1989). “I’m not one to love my limits: / I’m practicing being an empty house.” She writes of disability and poverty, both through her childhood and into adulthood, and the reduced options available to her through either, both. “My words,” she writes, to open the nine-part sequence “Pathography,” “always pale reflections for the language / of my organs. They say I am so lucky, to not have / a nephrostomy tube intubating my kidneys, delivering / my body of its own fluids, like E. I was lucky a nurse / didn’t have to come every other day to clean bandages / and disinfect the open wound like E. I got to stay in school, / collect a scholarship and student loans, pay rent, groceries.” She writes of agency, even when and through a seeming lack of such, forcing her way through, and hopefully past, the worst of it. As she writes, further along in the collection: “Consider: it is a privilege to have a story, to know your own / narrative as surely as you know your name.”