Stray Read online

  Copyright © 2017 by Allison LaSorda.

  All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any retrieval system, without

  the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). To contact Access Copyright, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call

  1-800-893-5777.

  Edited by Linda Besner.

  Cover and page design by Julie Scriver.

  Cover image copyright © 2008 “Feather” by Andrew Maruska, AndrewMaruska.com.

  Ebook by Bright Wing Books, www.brightwing.ca.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  LaSorda, Allison, author

  Stray / Allison LaSorda.

  Poems.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-0-86492-978-5 (paperback).

  ISBN 978-0-86492-979-2 (epub).

  ISBN 978-0-86492-980-8 (mobi)

  I. Title.

  PS8623.A7756S77 2017 C811’.6 C2016-907045-X

  C2016-907046-8

  We acknowledge the generous support of the Government of Canada, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Government of New Brunswick.

  Goose Lane Editions

  500 Beaverbrook Court, Suite 330

  Fredericton, New Brunswick

  CANADA E3B 5X4

  www.gooselane.com

  Contents

  FISH Backstroke

  Hit the Beach

  The Smallest Island

  Dog Star

  Playdate

  The Sea Is All about Us

  Shark Year

  No One Knows I’m Gone

  Youthless

  Elver

  Fish & Bird

  BIRD The First One’s Always Free

  Out of the Chorus

  Weather

  Deer Stand

  Reply to the Shepherd

  Fluid Dynamics

  Midsummer Signal

  The Wetlands Draw Conclusions

  Party Favours

  Glory Days

  Lime Kiln Ruins

  The End of Grief

  Fraterville Coal Mine

  Perseids

  Ricochet

  Coven

  MEAT More or Less at the Canal

  Horses

  Race, Stock, Kin

  Home Team

  Natural Crime

  Summer Vacation

  Messages from Thunder Bay

  Down with Exhaustion

  Buried Animals

  Ringling

  To a Point

  Homecoming

  Driving 25 Sideroad, North of 30

  We’re at that age

  Acknowledgements

  FISH

  Backstroke

  I was on the other line

  when you were dying, Daddio.

  Off-duty, smoothing things over

  with a guy whose face

  was a pot-holed wharf.

  He promised me glory.

  I became a decorated lifeguard.

  You went dim, seasick

  in some holy buoyancy,

  counting an eel’s inner rings

  to predict the tides.

  Tomorrow, a lineup of hours

  calling my bluff.

  I left him, Pops,

  ’cause you hated to see me cry.

  I hid a nerve in visions:

  mermaid purses and tongue stones

  washed to shore. Spectacular coughs

  barking from marine mammoths.

  Guilt shifted its gills,

  a known bottom-feeder.

  While I was picnicking

  by the coast,

  you called to tell me

  I walked with confidence.

  Hit the Beach

  Teenagers have cornered the market

  on attention from the elders.

  This might be my last chance.

  I can fight the aging process.

  Watch me become another person,

  just bring me one more drink.

  My softness is absorbent. Pray,

  set me free in malleability, or else

  accept the burden of clean-up duty.

  A shifting silhouette is ripe for typecasting.

  My flesh wobbles as I trample

  a castle’s remains, betrayed by high tide.

  I bask in the disdain. Am I different yet?

  Had I muscle tone or an observable waist,

  I’d be trusted to deliver my own meaning.

  If my temperament

  is more sand trap than sandbar,

  how can I ever grow up?

  The Smallest Island

  i.

  You hold your breath

  so long the swimming teacher

  plucks you from the shallows.

  An empty parking lot

  fumes in your belly.

  A reverse splash — gasp,

  your grin flipped onto the tiles.

  The first dessert you ever tasted

  whips itself into reflux.

  As if all the trees in the world

  were housed,

  there are no imaginations left.

  ii.

  Beach-bound. You launch

  out, toes spread, boogie board

  jouncing into whitecaps.

  The waves float plastic

  as you paddle

  and you’re swallowed

  in sea glass and cans,

  undertow crashing knee

  to coral. Blood drifts

  like jellyfish

  across your goggles.

  iii.

  You dig a fingernail

  into turquoise vinyl.

  Your sister turns over

  in a lawn chair, her skin

  glossy and marked by the straps.

  While handstanding, you see

  her sandal drift to the deep end.

  It settles amid ant clusters

  at pool bottom.

  You dive to rescue it,

  but she throws it back. Fetch.

  iv.

  You laugh until the

  corners of your mouth

  crack. The tide

  approaches steadily.

  Summers blur into

  one sloppy memory —

  Disney is Wasaga is Cape Cod.

  Photos from this day

  are sun-bleached. You,

  hand-on-hip on the boardwalk.

  Your sister, stained

  with two melted scoops;

  a relative you don’t recognize

  follows her, carrying plastic buckets.

  What’s inside them?

  Mother buries you

  on the beach until only

  your face feels air.

  Palm trees cut triangles

  of shadow onto the water.

  Dog Star

  The aquarium in the bar needs cleaning.

  A lion fish paddles listlessly

  towards patrons’ cartoon imaginations.

  Christmas lights draped across the glass

  bring us closer to the experience of stars

  than real stars. We witness the precise moment

  twinkle stars burn out and so, if a child asks,

  we can explain why they vanish into dark.

  Inside me a hare skitters.

  A man installed it as my spirit animal,

  but it doesn’t fit right. I hate running. I prefer dogs.

  I’ve seen dog jealousy and the human need

  to point it out, shame the sentiment away.

  Who could say I’m a traitor as my tongue

  lolls out, as I tell each person I’ve befriended:<
br />
  I’m sorry for your loss, there’s always next year.

  Playdate

  You’ve got me where you want me

  but what wants remain are paltry;

  I’ve bailed, searching out the lick

  in the split crow footprint of your spit,

  left to dry white astride my thighs.

  Let me rinse this off and spy

  what crops up in the flailing bouts

  of each time you couldn’t come out.

  Playing with you is like teaching

  a humpback whale how not to breach.

  The Sea Is All about Us

  Am I worried about it? Yes

  and no and no and yes,

  in no particular order.

  Here’s where it comes in,

  the sense that it’s always leaving.

  Today it’s unswimmable.

  I stand at Big Sur’s lip,

  unbound by a sense of

  plummeting I’ve shared

  in peaks with their own charm.

  Water froths like milk.

  The temperature is climbing,

  and I can’t understand

  what a conveyor belt

  has to do with undertow.

  It could mean I’ve homed in

  on shame’s root. My anxiety’s

  origin story isn’t in bleached reefs

  or fault lines, it’s in maws

  gaping with somedays.

  Waves dash between rocks

  until they’re foamy as saliva

  bubbled through teeth.

  I breathe a furrow into my forehead

  and carry this towel like a shield.

  Shark Year

  When I died the first time,

  I got a sinking feeling.

  It’s easier to think I can’t

  than I don’t want to.

  With an imposed trajectory,

  a valiant obstacle in my course,

  I’m off the hook.

  Leisure is to labour

  as is compromise to fervour.

  The second time,

  I want to be flesh

  chummed by bleachers

  of serrated teeth.

  Rolled up in a carpet

  and plunked into the sea.

  No One Knows I’m Gone

  In the thick of it you’d brighten

  at the sight of me, tracing

  the sternum bulge beneath my skin.

  My insides were the empty hull

  of a lode ship for an unnamed

  pilot, a conveyance withstanding

  heavy seas. Memory trick:

  frayed whitecaps prompt waiting.

  As my body dried out,

  I looked for a swimmer —

  the waking wet, sleeping wide,

  a blonde who wouldn’t Russify.

  Because I lied about everything

  except my height, gravesite

  and Walkyr bloodlines,

  there was no safety

  between our legs.

  Youthless

  Backswimmers skitter on stagnant water,

  gurgle-mouthed as the pond dips.

  My real morning face

  hosts bereavement in a flush

  that doesn’t stay.

  No wind. The vessel mired.

  An egg carton is a cardboard cradle.

  I neglect each question I’ve raised.

  Abandon these orphans

  in the stink of algal wonder,

  beady eyes wondering why.

  Cut to the warm part. My pollywogs

  grow legs, hop into backyard pool filters

  and only need me

  to resent where they came from.

  Elver

  Hook an eel and reel it in. It wraps around my hand

  and constricts like a boa. My cousin yells to hurry,

  get the lure out — but the muscle, the persistence grips.

  For the past week I’ve been visiting. I hug people,

  see them pause to sculpt an answer.

  Someone concedes they last saw me at a funeral.

  Blueberries wither in an old ice cream bucket.

  Things grow faster than I remember; I eat quickly.

  Clouds look different, more cheerful.

  Ancestors made nuisances of themselves here, casting

  their nets, planting, skills that have long left my blood.

  A high school friend tours me around the valley sites:

  the pig farm he can’t afford will be developed;

  this used to be that. The drive makes me ravenous.

  Stay in his childhood bedroom. He tells me he used to open

  a drawer to lock himself in when he got in trouble.

  I open the drawer while I undress.

  Fish & Bird

  The smallest cut has the fewest needs.

  The largest cut’s requirements surpass

  our abilities. That slit’s impossible to find

  unless by chance, and then proves tough

  to classify. Recognizable as flesh, not slash

  or butterfly, lance or scrape; neither prepared

  event nor accident. It exists between, a split

  virtually in twain. The largest cut plumbs

  unreachable depths, swims with blind,

  frightening fish. Its unlimited closets,

  hidden attics, shake with captured wind

  from the hubbub of birds’ wings.

  To call it a sinkhole mightn’t be wrong.

  The smallest cut is childhood, every memory

  a splinter. The largest cut is your potential,

  beckoning with inborn chirps like everything

  you couldn’t say, and everything you did.

  BIRD

  The First One’s Always Free

  If you were still mine,

  my sweet Jubilee, I’d bother

  to come up with sap to spew.

  I can’t name a specific thing

  I’d do for you, but maybe

  knowing is better than doing.

  Who in their right mind

  doesn’t want to be defined

  by each person they’ve left?

  Jubilee, remember our meet-cute?

  Can you see beyond prophecy

  and follow the interstate away

  from a house of ill repute?

  I can’t, so tell me to cool it

  or refill me with the oh yous

  you do so well, uncultured

  ten-month pearls, words

  clip-on gold for want of praise.

  Sweet, when you left I broke down

  from the upside, lurching past

  the space within a barren cleft.

  If we’d rather deal in dialects

  or muck around in sludge

  we sling to share, why bother?

  Out of the Chorus

  My barynya is just extraordinary.

  I beat my body like a drum. Sarafans

  swirl until vermilion embroidery blurs

  to great frenetic effect for a wannabe tsar.

  I would rather have been a ballerina,

  but I inherited the folksy costume.

  The audience gathers theatre side.

  Years of sad salt buildup

  crusted around my eyes, fusing

  with gold leaf for an alarming mask.

  I was born in the eyelashes of a hurricane:

  it rained dog pelts, relieving my mother

  from the sounds of pulsing monitors.

  She knew my dancer’s destiny.

  I’d squatted and leapt in utero, charting

  the records broken in every test.

  We out-Cossack the Cossacks, my partners say.

  Arm-flapping, toe-tapping Lezgi eagles and swans,

  hordes of one-trick ponies — we’re disciples

  of attention, raised and kept solely to perform.

  I can’t speak. My body spells out lockup for me.

  Weather
<
br />   The weather vane on the coop behind our house

  always points south. The joint is rusted.

  No forecasts worthy to report.

  Our school bus circles the forest that persists

  on the escarpment. Kids point, foreheads smearing

  windows, and say, That’s where the dead girl was found.

  Then trade snacks. The dump site

  a landmark, like where one of us used to live.

  Count the drainage pipes,

  think on the tug of ditch.

  When it rains, it rains.

  A kid says willows are the saddest trees,

  but they’re rare. You picture cattails

  pocking a resting place, uneasy birds

  that mistake her hair for brome.

  Sultry air a yoke around the neck.

  Nothing moves.

  Pull away, and it tightens.

  The forest is not for us, though we talk trees

  till we stop remembering. Ginkgos, if female,

  drop putrid seeds come autumn. Their scent

  on the ground, on the wind, while days get shorter.

  Deer Stand

  You place yourself into a photo

  of a hunting blind on stilts

  above tall grass, the area blasted

  with pre-sunset light.

  You do not think beyond the shot.

  The clearing in the forest

  is your projection, elastic and foolish.

  For hours you stare at the image

  to solve a magic eye painting:

  the composition of a hurricane

  brews behind the silver birch,

  its force dispelling focus

  from the deer stand. You’re the buck,

  ambling without dread at the foot

  of a ladder. Your body, an eight-point

  slingshot, tensed for a divine moment

  that must be seized and mounted, or else

  forgotten. A display of love, you cut

  cool air with your trace, not thinking

  about suddenly disappearing.

  Reply to the Shepherd

  Without expecting gentleness,

  I take my moral code in stride.

  Flash to stark undress. The herder

  uses a strong-eye and heel approach.

  In truth, I yield easily. It’s mind-blowing,

  how fast he rubs off on me.