This One Unbearable LifeBy Roxanna Bennett
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I was trained to doubt all feelings
having learned the information is unverifiable therefore lies. A lifetime, that’s what we get, this one unbearable life & yet it is borne. The world says I am worthless, bad, so bad, the world wears its hard heart on its sleeve, I am worn apart from its belief, I am a worm, weak & sensitive, am moved by the least, a mother raccoon removing her babies one at a time from our neighbour’s attic, climbing down the drainpipe face-first, an infant dangling from her jaws, a blue jay’s fake crow caw to steal peanuts from squirrels, how it feels to learn I may never, may never, may never & my child may never, may never ever. The main effort is remembering songbirds in every season, the paradox of being wretched & beloved. "If I Could Harvest the Sound of the Dark"By Roxanna Bennett
Steve’s long-lost fancy BBC cousin
flew to Canada with his husband to visit our weedy garden, we hid, me & my kid, grubby little goblin, people unfit for public consumption. Or is it all in my head, delusion my faithful companion. “Quit babbling,” said the White Rabbit, “your cellwalls allfull of untranslatable lingua, your skullspells gallbill your tellwell, they killwell your illall with skillbulls & dullspells, with pillwalls & callbells & skullpells your fullwell.” Or something to that effect. “Pillows are my favourite thing,” my kid said. Will I leave this floorbed, should I invest in my hands, flamefingered, all objects are loss when surgery’s no longer elective. Who speaks for the body with filaments & fingers, sinuous gesture & silence, how does your voice smell, how does your hearing taste, what sound is the light upon your face, what rite realized in the antenna of your spine. “If I could harvest the sound of the dark— ” purplefish in vibrato, “indifferent, ecstatic scraps of paper,” no visitors, nothing by mouth. Verge, a lip quivers, spills streams of violet soldiers. Not living enough, years of revision from strange to stranger. Dr. Strange, I’m not become, I am, I am. Or was. Arms against yourself, your own earliness scrutinized, collages of rooms slices of light traffic livingness cables chemtrails cereal boxes What living in so boxes & boxes? Stanley Kubrick’s ordered boxes, monolithic. Monkey murders as fact, as accepted as gendered brains in gendered bodies. Cultureless, one brain like another, jarred, floating. Pickled language can’t name the state of needs unfulfilled. What word is that, loneliness? One expects filled forms, certain colours not this oscillation purplefish feed on tadpoles, under lilies, on McDonald’s fries scattered in the parking lot salt spilled & ziggurats of rot out back of the supermarket billions of tonnes of slick liquid that used to be food drowns capitals & the highways are empty shopping malls a bloodbath of crashed pterodactyls circle the & in that silence has passed us & keeps going Some possibilities should be left in the ether. Twisted bicycles, atomic silhouettes, organize against the normal. Look, look at the silence, it tastes like snow There is a Wound in EveryoneBy Roxanna Bennett
I hunt monsters in the mirror, I backhand
the labyrinth, it’s backend background for myth & I am Queen of the Cripples, Duchess of Delusion, We royally are (a pain) Empress of Injury, hoarding hurts in the countinghouse, tallying coins cast from melted-down spoons. Parallel play/parallel pain, the dark non-equatable hole dug out of the hard earth by the ground-down spoonful, the cave the child hides inside, uncoaxable, inconsolable, there is a wound in everyone. Its size, shape, particular, often paved over, boarded up, hidden, so deeply rooted its bearer can’t bear to know it exists, but birthmarked, the fear of death & living our human heritage. Peer into the pain, its mirror, remember we are all five inside, even the people in power, even the doctors in & out of their unclimbable towers, everyone. I sing my five-year-old lullabies but it doesn’t buy into my alibis, won’t fall for more lies, it would rather die alone outside, following fireflies into the sea. Unnatural History MuseumsBy Roxanna Bennett
A Disaster Area black hole dwells
in the belly, a playpen for undeveloped species. All cities are unnatural history museums, sick tentacles spread extinction like a solution for shopping. Gelatinous liars stole our sacred senses, we let them. Mithras, Saturn X-ed out, the Bridge of Sighs fed another rare bird into the fire. Rinse & repeat after me: keep on pushing, keep on praying, keep on faking, selling, shaming. Grow plastic, caustic, keep hating. & the forests, the birds, the animals, aliens, oceans, sphinxes. We’ll keep waiting. The Lost DodoBy Roxanna Bennett
Is Anne Carson autistic or am I
projecting understanding & if you find that offensive—why? Did you think sanism was the only narrative. Or did you think to think. To think is overrated, or am I overthinking again? Ask the vegetables in the salt mine, E. razes some prospects in this prospectus. Protect us from formulas 1 to 10. Protect us from counting cards again. Don’t ask us to count you among us, nothing about us without us. Synchronous or schizoaffective depends on your affect. Are you pretty, are you smiling? Translate: go quietly or we’ll replace you with a replica skeleton. Roxanna Bennett is a disabled poet gratefully living on the traditional territories of the Mississaugas of Scugog Island First Nations covered by the Williams Treaties of 1923. She is the author of Unmeaningable (Gordon Hill Press, 2019), unseen garden (knife | fork | book, 2018), and The Uncertainty Principle (Tightrope Books, 2014).
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