Articulate Skin, or, Top Three Favourite RaccoonsBy Dawn Macdonald
I need to think
of something about this big and in two colors, he says and I say, what? His daughter asks, Dad, when grown, must I get ink? and I delayed with, well, if pressed I’d plump for Maxwell’s equations, two on each of my eager arms, but can never decide whether to partition by electric vs magnetic field, or divergence vs curl, and should one include the term for magnetic monopoles? I do hold out a certain hope. divergence of E = rho sub e over epsilon-naught should parallel divergence of B = mu-naught times rho sub b, not zero, though any 0’s attractive. Haha not in the sense of electromagnetic charge. By now we’ve forgotten the topic and I can skip away, unmarked. * — Speaking of my favourite raccoon, Žižek — — But is Žižek your favourite raccoon? — Well, no, that would be Raccoon Taco — a neigh- bourhood cat, with banded tail, whose energy evokes a prior tom named Taco, a taco cat, palindrome prowler of selfsame streets. — Also that raccoon that tried to bite us in a daylight drama in Stanley Park, and a couple of cartoon raccoons — e.g. CBC’s The Raccoons raccoons — — But, say, top ten — — not really — but here’s the thing, Žižek can never be our favourite raccoon among raccoons, or even anything of animal nature, yet his raccoon-ness makes him a favourite among “raccoonlike philosophers” of which he may be the only representative — we feel he would understand, that we respond to the animal nature in the man though it fades beside any animal. That’s also why I don’t have a tattoo. * We all are like raccoons; we wash our garbage; they eat our garbage; they wash their hands. * This morning someone at work defeated the proscription against all-staff emails and used it to try to give away 30 live chickens. All aspects of this appear to represent our precise moment, a time of cluck and churn. You cannot ban successfully the birds from your communication channels. Buck buck, buck buck, they say, we’re free. Make money from our eggs. We lay assiduously. But please, the owner must divest. I’ve got my own chicken-scars — here, on the thumb; here, on the wrist. The marks of broody beaks defending nestbox. How could one seek a mark outside such conflict. Man versus nature. Man versus chicken. Man versus herself. * Perhaps one day I’ll write the perfect grant. An application of art. The award will go directly into the flesh. And I’ll be ever after walking cash, conspicuously consuming myself. What if you get fat, they say, and the art must stretch. What if you don’t eat. Until you’re pen-thin, then a curling flick of ink. * The poem by bidet, no, Bidart, where she eats and doesn’t eat, she loves ice cream. The forcing of the frame into lines. The placing of lines about the body. Selling these things to the magazines. To the granting council. Buying self-care. Writing as therapy. Trauma as therapy. And so forth. The raccoons stare in shock, no, in hunger, no, inscrutable. It’s getting dark and will until the ink runs out. Don’t lose track of your feelings, said my fortune cookie, which I didn’t comprehend until I flipped for French. Vos sentiments vous apporteront lumière. And all around the windowpane, string lights come on. * What if you eat your art. What if your art eats. What if you abstract yourself away. Dawn Macdonald lives in Whitehorse, Yukon, where she was raised off the grid. Her poetry appears in places like Grain and Nat. Brut, and also in places like Asimov’s Science Fiction and Wizards in Space. Her first collection, Northerny, is forthcoming from University of Alberta Press.
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