Glad

By Tanis MacDonald

​The winter we talked about brain fog and meant it,
cerebral cumuli bulbous and obscuring most
first names and all the good verbs.
 
Rough transitions, suddenly every photo
was a deer giving us side-eye; how long
has this been going on? It was enough
 
to make me climb to the top of my game and
jump off. How can I tell you I was glad for it,
that blessed cease of buzzsaw roar,
 
glad to eat an orange, peel rasping beneath my teeth. 
I embraced my grouchiness and it said Woman,
get your hands off me. I respect that. 

---

Artificial Sky

By Tanis MacDonald

At the hotel that summer, the clerk
openly hated me, sneered at
 
my accent and gave us a terrible room
so you hated him back because I despise 
 
no one on my own behalf.  
 
I had logged nineteen years on the planet
when someone asked me
 
what it was like to be a walking cliché.
Which cliché they were thinking of?
 
There are so many that I don’t live up to. 
 
The real author of Go Ask Alice wanted
her name on the cover after
 
thirty years of pretending to be
a dead teenager and I can’t blame her.
 
Those were some impressive sales.
 
Most nights I dream my mother’s still alive
and I’ve forgotten to call her for years.
 
I envy the couple slow-dancing
with their tiny senior rescue dogs.
 
You said to meet you at the place with
the artificial sky and I agreed, but when I arrived,
 
I couldn’t decide what was fake about it. 

---

On the Blink

By Tanis MacDonald

I don’t get people with no inner narrator,
and I don’t understand
how I live with mine. Glory on toast. 
Courage, with instant Quik.
 
What seems sudden has been heading this way
like a scared train or runaway
rabbit since August, since the 1970s, since I learned
to swim. Cleverness chews defeat.
 
Forty-five minutes until my next Zoom call
and I raised my digital hand
three times during the last one. I have returned
to wearing flannel shirts
 
years after being class-shamed out of them,
and I cannot say enough
how spectacular they are to my breasts,
who love plaid coverage.
 
My best friend from grade seven chose MAID after
a diagnosis of the very same
cancer that her twin died from and she knew
so hard she wanted out now. 
 
I heard so long after the fact there was nothing
I could do but blink.
When I am ignorant, I have such confidence:
it’s hard to give that up.

---

Emily Brontë was good at cursing

                                                                           —Anne Carson, “The Glass Essay”

By Tanis MacDonald

​How badly I want this to be fact, to change
me into the kind of manatee I deserve.
 
Goddamn it, says Emily, caught on the moor in the freezing rain.
 
A small white car with the vanity plate
XLDADBOD turns on the right-turn signal a long time
before the Equitable Insurance office,
 
the one on Westmount, with the logo that looks likes
a blue vagina.
 
Fuck, says Emily, can they do that?
 
It’s a grey spring and every church basement
in town lures me with clothing swaps.
Hyancinths look like they just spat out a tooth.
 
Shit, says Emily. We’ve got those here.
 
I float in my river and pass beneath the boats.
I think vegetarian thoughts.
 
Balls, says Emily. Get out of there before you drown.

---

​Tanis MacDonald (she/they) is the author of Straggle: Adventures in Walking While Female and six other books. New writing has recently appeared in Consilience, FreeFall, and Canadian Literature, and her next book, Tall, Grass, Girl, is forthcoming with Book*hug Press. A free-range literary animal, Tanis was raised in Treaty One territory and now lives as a grateful guest on Haldimand Treaty land, near the Grand River in southwestern Ontario.