Jennifer Still is the winner of the 2012 Banff Centre Bliss Carman Poetry Award and the 2012 John Hirsch Award for Most Promising Manitoba Writer. Her second collection of poems, Girlwood (Brick Books, 2011), was nominated for the 2012 Aqua Books Lansdowne Prize for Poetry. Faculty member for the 2013 Banff Centre of the Arts Wired Writing Studio, Jennifer lives in Winnipeg where she is a poetry editor for the literary journal CV2. She’s mostly scared.
Finding the Rat
(after Bonnie Marin’s Mortal Reckonings)
When the thermometer draws its blade and we don’t know the cut we are reading.
In the lounge light, your forehead, the trickling glass.
Moon backed away dragging its coldcloth. Breath, its spiny ripple.
There was no noise to it, just one step around another.
You pinched your lips. Took fever with a straw.
The term is not “addiction” or “illness”, not the colonizing of psyche and spirit, but the proud ownership of sad dreams, “people deemed mad”.
I can’t make up what I saw or didn’t. The pale bloat, the gluey eye.
There was no story, just subfloor, substrata, the spine of an old scurrying.
Meat thermometer, a metaphor for the overdone. Your dial eyes, dialyzed. A reading where there used to be a face.
There is nowhere to sleep that isn’t hooked. Brother, what depths are you gauging? Footboard measures, the small spasms of our dreams.
Silence spills its wax. Crawlspace drips a rat. The dim bulb of a past furred in dust. We came to you with gaps for faces. Hair grown over as hoods.
When the frame of your narrow hand collapsed in mine, so springy and slight, it was as if a fan had folded and all day the frail abrasions inside touch. Self, a fine awareness of bone that should never be crossed.
You found me in your smallest light. A glint that suggested a pebble and not the pale tip of what you were, a stoneface radiating for graves beyond us.
Light, when I stood back, was a fingerbone, a rubber glove. A gowned hand gathering the silence.
Give me a story, rat. A joist to adjust the jurying.
Who we are is still writing itself.