cancel Calm, and apps
like Focus, Zen, and Freedom
the ones that liberate
time.
close all the two hundred
and fifty-two open
tabs on my phone about
self-care, mindbodygreen,
sourdough recipes,
listicles, BuzzFeed, Bored Panda,
20 FACTS ABOUT MARLON
BRANDO
and other articles like “How
I Stopped Working
for the Man and Brought
In
over Six Figures a Month,”
says the rosy-cheeked
french-manicured blond
influencer.
cancel all my health-type
subscriptions,
turn off all my notifications
and reminders
to drink water, to get up
and stretch for thirty seconds,
to box breathe, cancel
previously free now not-free pandemic
subscriptions during my
short-lived shelter-in-place
aspirations of knitting,
breadmaking, preserve making,
guitar playing,
indie-film watching.
put on my noise-cancelling
earphones
and actually – i want to
so much –
rest.
at work when i log in
my emails number in the
three digits.
still. emerge from my
four-day
migraine
and previous to that my
two-week
vacation working-at-home-catching-up
staycation, and previous
to that a number
of breaks that have done
nothing
to bring my stress or
workload down. i start
the twentieth to-do list
that never gets shorter
and my heart begins its
erratic
thumping.
There are echoes here of other medical-themed titles, titles that examine physical and emotional vulnerabilities in fearless and revealing ways, whether Ottawa writer Christine McNair’s hybrid/memoir Toxemia (Toronto ON: Book*hug Press, 2024) [see my essay on such here], New York City poet Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr.’s After the Operation (New York NY: Four Way Books, 2025), Regina, Saskatchewan poet Tea Gerbeza’s How I Bend Into More (Windsor ON: Palimpsest Press, 2024) [see my review of such here] or Toronto poet Therese Estacion’s Phantompains (Toronto ON: Book*hug, 2021) [see my review of such here]. Désil’s allostatic load, alternately, also offers an additional series of layerings, as the poem “on a particularly bad year-long stretch” affirms, writing: “of racial injustice, extrajudicial killings // work microaggressions / general climate of anti-Blackness // my body expropriated – pain / wouldn’t let me out of bed // my body—was this betrayal? or / affirmation[.]”
Set with single-poem “prologue I” (“searching for indicators”) and three numbered section-clusters of poems—“allostatic load,” “weathering” and “medicine”—the first two sections holding a single-poem “prologue II” (“Coping Like John Henry”) between them, offering a suite of poems in slow build, a spread-out and accumulative description of stress, excess, medical complications and stressful interactions before the eventual emergence into something that might provide salve. This collection asks: What does care look like through such perpetual onslaught on the senses? How might care even be possible? “when the medical-office assistant ushers me down the hall,” begins “on my Nth visit to yet another medical professional,” “and asks me to get on the scale / it fails to tell her that the number reflects / the cares i neglect to dispense, / emails i forgot to dispatch – including the ones sitting / rent-free in my brain, the owed return phone calls, / and text messages, and emails, and to-dos, / and 252 open tabs, and / unfinished conversations settling in my chest, / on my hips, in my thighs. i eat my feelings / because it’s unacceptable to have them, no that’s not / true. i portion control my emotions and keep / my mouth busy so as not to earn the angry Black woman / badge.”
As well, I appreciate this mention of, this linkage to, Cecily Nicholson’s poetry title prior to this current one [see my review of such here], allowing a conversation between these two titles, connecting the narrator and experience of one to the other, both poetry collections writing of and around colonialism and race, and of finally attempting a sequence of grounding, sustainability and responsibility, through working their hands through the soil. As Désil writes as part of the third and final section, “medicine”:
i read HARROWINGS while
overturning soil on abandoned beds,
violently hacking the
blackberries back, burning piles of thorny,
snake-thick vines. the blackberry
bushes have invaded and
colonized the beds and
the surrounding soil, choking the male
kiwi tree – also
overbrown, its branches braiding beautifully
as it drapes. slash through
the uneasiness – on this soil that i
tell people is home – here.
the three goats i’ve inherited browse
nearby on the blackberry
bushes that we haven’t gotten to. later
they will sit contentedly,
stare, regurgitate their earlier meal.
