Showler - Failure to thrive: poems

POEMS | SUZANNAH SHOWLER ECW press | a misFit book SENSORY ANCHORS THE REASON Because you are the kind of person who lets their perishables expire the way they want to, from the inside out (say, like an eggplant, the colour velour was invented to live up to, rubber-skinned, preserving its opaque dignity until the eleventh hour when you touch it with, maybe, a dirty chopstick, and it collapses into its own long-sludge-gone guts), the kind of person whose circadian rhythm has a half-life, who has too-vividly imagined the texture of wet rat fur (considered the rat as what might emerge, grease-licked, from the turnpike of the throat), who worries over a receding gumline, spends mornings after-punched from blown-out night hues (colour-blocked, full-field-of-view, edges like scintillating scotomas), keeps the moths in the pantry for pets, has a mantra (there is too much of everything) to scrawl across any surface that will end (humid water-film on windows, Post-its laid out in art supply stores to test the mettle of pens) I know you will know what I mean when I say: Vacuum me up. Blot my face out with a plunger. Let my mitosis be reverse-engineered. Withdraw me into the dark. I take it all back. NOTES TOWARDS SOMETHING NEARLY ALLEGORICAL The ground, clay heavy, follows you across the field, caught in your tread, grey and mottled with the aftermath of a hobby harvest: the stalks of sunflowers mummified, light as bird bones.

You arrive at the back of the property, your feet scraped equine on the unmowed grass behind the house. There is the house again in miniature, in stone, and you go into it. In a room freshly turned into a shrine, you reach into the viscera of a dust green duffel, pass your hand over. When you leave, youll pull yourself out of the valley to the tune of a few hours hitchhike, moving with an odd-digited limp, carried onward by the skin of your thumbs. DAY FOR EVASION The morning offers evidence of a rain you slept through, pavement like grease soaked through a sandwich bag, and theres definitely a fire burning inside the metal Muppet-mouthed industrial garbage bin open outside No Frills. The fires low and mangy, like a nest where light hatches, and the air out here smells like a dentists office in its busy time: overheating rubber, periodic elements, a fresh mess of fragile membrane cut into, pulled back every hard, impacted thing removed.

This is a pretty good day for evasion, and youd like to volunteer your service for something clean and memorable, maybe running interference for the No Frills shoppers tenderly nosing their way past displays shocking as capped front teeth, performing what reads as a well-considered dumb show. This course of action has all the vision, all the hoist of a boom lift. Now seems as good a time as any to admit: youve never seen something so thoroughly as to forget its name, and more than once, the constellations have let you down. You can feel the days details waiting to pitch towards you like an airbag deploying an ultra-white, full-frontal bloom of goodness in your face. The fire in the bin is still brooding. Youd like to tell someone its meaning isnt lost on you.

NOTES ON INTEGRITY What if we stopped predicting the weather and agreed to run it ragged? To demonstrate: a dramatization of a pigeon being hit by a car, except in this instance, the pigeon wins. Once a month its moving day. Walking home, youll notice everyone is having a night in their lives. Most people are now experts on design. Im pretty sure this guy I know is faking imposter syndrome. But dont we all just want to stand, mostly upright, in a stick figure forest of contemporaries? At the very least, Id like to make a name for myself in the lost art of skywriting.

I was going to say something crucial. But I forget what. CROSSING THE HIGH LEVEL BRIDGE A seagull jumps off, the wind cracks it open over the nestled knot of some inner-bird hinge like the ugly joisting of a jaw, and its cradled, portside to your cheek, carving out the pendulum of a weight even-keeling from a mobile short on slack. If this days hours are a page, then minutes find their end in folded birds, and your relationship to passing time is best described as vigilant: youre careful with wings, the sharp-cornered pleats that make a beak, aware that in your hands youre holding papers best impression of a weapon. The bridge is very long. The wind pushes you in some direction.

And that damn seagull hangs in a new plane of gravity its been gifted, waiting for nothing, comforted by its new and enviable way of being alone. JEOPARDY What is the Magna Carta? Who is Helen Keller? What are light emitting diodes? Where is West Texas? What is a carbuncle? What is fractional distillation? What are and, or, nor, for, yet, but, and so? Who is Genghis Khan? Where is the abyssal zone? What is a hypnic jerk? What is elbow grease? Where are the blind leading the blind? What is a dissociative fugue? What is a proof of purchase? Where is the last place you would think to look? What are the contents of your refrigerator? What is a state of exception? What is an organ-bruising punch to the gut? Who is the patron saint of misdirected feelings? What is the etymology of disappointment? Where is the origin of the problem? What is authentic evidence of some unlikely thing? What is nostalgia for something that never occurred? Where is the best place to hide evidence of wrongdoing? What is the direction in which we are currently headed? REMOTE SHARING One day you wake up, and its like youve already been to Tuscaloosa, passed the taxidermists licensing exam, and now youre roving the low country in a PT Cruiser, ego bloating like a sourdough starter. The truth is the turning radius on this model is shit. The psychic diagnosed your penchant for higher learning, advised you tend your dream diary with thinning shears, accept every discarded cell phone ring still branded on your nerves as a talisman. Superstition has often come at you with an orbit-dragging lust, but these days you could probably make it through hurricane season without lamenting your disbanded trivia team. THIRTEEN SUBCATEGORIES found poem Accidental deaths by location Victims of aviation accidents or incidents Accidental deaths by electrocution Accidental deaths from falls Filmed accidental deaths Firearm accident victims Deaths by horse-riding accident Hunting accident deaths Industrial accident deaths People who died in ATV accidents Railroad accident victims Space program fatalities Deaths in sport PRETTY GOOD TIME AT THE OLFACTORY FACTORY Human skull preserved behind the bar in the officers mess at the local armoury.

Beach barbecue at low tide on the outskirts of a mid-sized city still flanked by industry. Cabbage sliced late at night with a steel knife. Coconut-sweet wind laced with salt bending around the near-albino mesa of potash burped up out of the prairie. Mildew-wet, Play-Dohy renovations to the basement of a fixer-upper. A Scratch n Sniff sticker with all the good stuff scratched out of it. Bike lock in winter coaxed open with a crme brle torch.

A flexible grade of rubber used in the production of several toys that were popular in the mid-nineties and discontinued by the early aughts. Sweat in a darkroom. YOU AND YOUR RICH INNER LIFE External conditions conspire to slip along the waxy thread of your nerves and hunker down, cathectic, in the carry-on you keep at the ready for a flight from the everyday. We sign off on an agreement to accept what the senses offer: a volley of errors. Anything to interrupt the hypnotic mumbling that lips the inner retaining wall of the skull. Nobody ever tells a stitch of metal vacuumed inside a light bulb to conduct itself better.