Copyright © 2017 by Allison LaSorda.
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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.
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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.