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.
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.”
