I write poetry for myself, I write poetry for myself[1]
By Nikki Reimer
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I want to achieve real embodiment as praxis
I want to pivot on all my past utterances If by “going to the gym” you mean “napping on the couch in my underwear” then yeah, I’ll meet you there My darling it has been too many moons Come home, the cats are crying Come home and perform emotional labour on the seat of my insecurities Come with me down the rabbit hole of my vain search for dopamine “Turn your rot into a renaissance masterpiece” O my precious solipsistic robot Can’t we turn away from this baroque narrative moment This specious narrative artery All bombast and bloodborne All ugly creatures die by the sword O my beloved cryptid O my hideous monster I am thinking about anxiety as contagion How panic travels from body to body I am thinking about the impossibility of renovating one’s negative self-core belief as a problem of sunk cost I've been a piece of shit for 40 years! It serves me, it serves me I meant to cage my ego in gratitude but lost track of time, had a nap instead O my vast September idiocy I want to take a single internet test to map out the remainder of my sullen days, my woollen daze, my salad haze [1] Dan Bejar
After crying at the Urban Fare on December 31, 2019 in
By Nikki Reimer
There is a coastal spring quality to the air today that reminds me of Vancouver. Chinook or climate change? Everyone is pregnant and I can’t understand their optimism. The air tastes like fresh hope and death, bergamot. No beginnings but in endings. The album from Rena arrives in the post. On the cover, her hand partly covers her face. My brother’s ashes glitter the diamond on her right ring finger. The cat is bored and wants me to play with him but I’m back in bed already; I need one more nap to face the close of the decade. No beginnings but in endings. I know Urban Fare is bourgeois but it was on the way home and I was tired. I’m a class traitor every day but in the wrong direction. In Claresholm your father is dying and in Calgary I’ve opened the window to let in pseudo-sea air. Australia is on fire. None of us are getting out of this.
Regress or be destroyed
By Nikki Reimer
It is 1:11 a.m. and we are tweeting about carbs. We have been baking bread and sharing pictures of potatoes. Someone is always talking about yeast. What also rises. Someone else already claims the irrelevance of the baking of bread in our time because capitalism as death cult must always seek to name activities as passé when they hit mainstream uptake. The engine needs us to fear our own obsolescence in the identification of that which is over. Don’t love the thing you embraced yesterday. This is how they keep us trapped in an endless consumptive cycle, eternally chasing The New. Marx told us, man. He fucking warned us, bro. The same could be said for poetry. Whereas we once had a seat at the table of the discourse, we no longer know the terms of reference. This is what is known as the process of elimination. Our elders have begun to die. Was this what we had planned for our one wild and precious life? I don’t want this anxiety of fading influence, I don’t want this culture that paves over our many genealogies. I want to sit at the table of the elders, I want to set a place for communal discourse. Let me be the socially distant potato you want to sit beside, when next we are allowed to break bread. Let me hold your tender creations in my mouth.
SO WHAT
By Nikki Reimer
Dear everyone I’m still sorry for the narrative bent of my recent writings/I don’t know how to make these layers of trauma into art. The manthropocene howls. The fucking moon is full and yesterday the cat sunk one of his claws full deep to the bone of my pointer finger. SO WHAT. The wound formed a white moon ringed in purple. Here is the dawn of my poetics of the plaintive. SO WHAT. It’s a pollen-bitten pandemic dawn tinged with the deep regret of spring. SO WHAT. Jesus wept. The other cat pissed all over our shoes twice today. SO WHAT. I collected your father’s things from the hospital: two pillows, pyjamas, his shaving kit. His duffel bag a welcome/unwelcome burden against my hip, my right shoulder seizing from the weight on the sweaty walk home. What is a man’s final mass at death? At the end we are all of us collections of objects to throw out or pass/on. SO WHAT. The neighbours aren’t allowed in the house. No hugging. This antiseptic mourning must not be spoken aloud. SO WHAT. His shaving kit. The cat piss. Flowers in the garage. The goddamn silver moon. I’m writing this from a windswept prairie town population 3,780. SO WHAT.
this is not my beautiful horse
By Nikki Reimer
Who fails at good citizenship in this pandemic / grow wan at the promo for the online reading I’m sorry I cannot I will not I prefer not to / cocoon bed or marooned / embody the ghost ship / “it’s not the optimal time to die” / we’ve thrown out the ratty towels and bedsheets / a lifetime reduced to the sifted detritus / the vacuum robot hums its homing beacon / I hum myself / we’re underwater / the gentle horse pressed her nose into my armpit, breathed softly onto my face / we can’t donate or sell or throw anything away / no poetry of stasis / you get up to smoke / my quarantinin’ bean / I’d never met that horse but she caressed me like a lover / this is not symbolic I’m talking about a physical horse / your dad’s off running with the fox / the back door blown open / yellow flannel sheets / we’re sitting in this house till it’s safe to deconstruct it / what if it’s never safe to deconstruct it / as for me and my house / ran out of energy to produce / beautiful content for the timeline / so I don’t deserve love / is that a stress hive or / not my beautiful house / too late too soon / all keening in the death house / all quiet in the death house / all thrumming in the wall /
Nikki Reimer is a carbon-based life form / fifth-generation settler of Ukrainian and Russian Mennonite descent who resides on the traditional territories of the people of the Treaty 7 region in Southern Alberta. Reimer writes poetry, non-fiction, and micro-reviews, and dabbles in multidisciplinary art practices. Published books are My Heart is a Rose Manhattan (Talon Books 2019), DOWNVERSE (Talon Books 2014), and [sic](Frontenac House 2010). Visit reimerwrites.com.
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