Liz Howard

Your eyes open the night’s slow static at a loss

to explain this place you’ve returned to from above;

cedar along a broken shore, twisting in a wake of fog.

I’ve lived in rooms with others, of no place and no mind

trying to bind a self inside the contagion of words while

your eyes open the night’s slow static. At a loss

to understand all that I cannot say, as if you came

upon the infinite simply by thinking and it was

a shore of broken cedar twisting in a wake of fog.

If I moan from an animal throat it is in hope you

will return to me what I lost learning to speak.

Your eyes open the night’s slow static at a loss

to ever know the true terminus of doubt, the limits of skin.

As long as you hold me I am doubled from without and within:

a wake of fog unbroken, a shore of twisted cedar.

I will press myself into potential, into your breath,

and maybe what was lost will return in sleep once I see

your eyes open into the night’s slow static, at a loss.

Broken on a shore of cedar. We twist in a wake of fog. 

My mother hunted moose

as a child my grandfather taught her

how to field dress a bull:

make an incision from the throat

to the pelvis

the abdominal cavity emptied

haul him up between two pines

the body inverted

antlers almost grazing

the soil

each hind limb leashed to a trunk above

to allow the flesh to cool

then she’d climb inside

the open chest

fix her toes along the ledge

of two ribs

and with a kick to the bull’s left shoulder

he sent her

swinging

I just want to go back

into the bush and eat

more blueberries

growing wild as she

drops me off at the lumber

mill I’m fifteen and a janitor

cleaning out the urinals

at the debarker I find

pubic hair the lumberjacks

have left long barbs curled

to “put me in my place”

debarker: where they

keep the machine that

cuts the bark away from

the trees years ago my

blood cousin fell in

and emerged skinless

that was before this brain

sprouted from my spine

in an allegory trees

would be distributed

evenly throughout the

narrative in a gesture

of looking back over

my shoulder as mom

pulls away from the

yard I have on a hard

hat that is orange and too

big over my weird bleached

hair I have only the same

rag for the toilets as the

dishes when I look up the

sky is obscured by smoke

I can never tell what

they’re burning

I am my world. (The microcosm.)

– Ludwig Wittgenstein

Hospitality: the first demand

what is your name?

the city bound me so I entered

to dream a science that would name me

daughter and launch beyond

grief, that old thoracic cause

myocardium: a blood-orange foundry

handed down by the humoral

anatomists and not be

inside my own head perpetually

not simply a Wittgenstein’s girl

but an infinite citizen in a shaking tent

If you are in need of an answer

consult a jiisakiiwinini

scientific rigour

psychoanalysis

the unconscious a construct

method amphibious

of two minds

that’s the translator

her task to receive

the call that comes

down the barrel

of the future

all of us a congress

of selves a vibrational chorus

I know myself to be a guest

in your mind a grand lodge

of everything I long to know and hold

within this potlatch we call

the present

moment

If I speak of the night

speak its illicit cerebrum

of branches and back seats

speak beyond our future

a thinkable urn

my empirical training

my non-status brow ridge

indivisible and glistening

every time I tease a thread of being

from its moment in standard time

let’s elevate the coordinates of distress

take it all in

I’m all in and over the limit

the limit, the eliminative, the lumens, the mens rea, the loom

to be a shopkeep in the showroom of nouns

what to purchase and what

to disavow

speak with saffron

speak of just the small bits, atomic

speak of the inevitable curve in the data

all foreclosed upon and glimmering

like a good bitch in the brine of night

I haven’t nearly enough heat here

in this stakeout

the sky died and I’m its anima in the pitch thickets

I have fingers with which to squish

pin cherries and rosehips

dogwood, I have begun

to hear a rosary of pure tones, the colony

hear its call toward disorder

citizens, I have never

been dishonest in my horror

the underclass of our era

a requisite paternity test

dominus

in excelsis

The sky was never my court date.

If I died once. If I left the body.

Habeas corpus.

This is not my grave.

The value in a dead woman

is that she cannot be killed

again or cross-examined.

The value in being the dead

woman at trial is the Crown

doesn’t represent you

regardless.

The value in being

dead is that it’s impolite

to speak ill

of you.

What is called

wellness,

victim-witness?

A swab taken

of every orifice.

Were there any

identifying marks?

Were you in fact

on the moon

that night,

Miss Howard?

Did you make a choice?

I made a cut—it released something.

I broke the line.