11/18/2019 POETRY: ANNICK MACASKILLBOTTLED Light slow as honey in its antique shell, rubber stopper lazy at the end, snarled curl of the lip ring silver round glass—yes glass, but thick, the kind that keeps you guessing, stretching feeble for the other side. The way a frenzied starling builds her nest in May, one flimsy clutch of twigs at a time. The light unclaimed through my delay, seeping in as if from nowhere, stilted, clotted as in the white-shelled tank I saw one inverted summer day in Melbourne, where a squid lay slumped in a corner like a pile of unwashed laundry, her eye a steady accusation before the rounded window that glimpsed our own grey-glimmer world. TRY TO HATCH FISH AND STONES* know what to do with your chalky misfortunes. Revive dreams like mammoths, an old relationship. Await the birth of a patience, eternal, yet to be mastered in any hemisphere. Know what to do with disappointment. If lucky, lucky. In the long quest for an everyday, don’t forget to revise your expectations. Protect the charge that is your wanting. If queer, well. Know what to do with heartache. Hitch your wagon to a laboratory. Keep that hope within your belly, under the perfect tuxedo flap of skin, snug beneath your lungs. *“Berlin gay penguins adopt abandoned egg.” BBC News from Elsewhere, 12 August, 2019. Reporting by Martin Morgan. Annick MacAskill is a queer and feminist poet and translator based in Kjipuktuk (Halifax) on the traditional and unceded territory of the Mi'kmaq. Her debut collection, No Meeting Without Body (Gaspereau Press, 2018), was nominated for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award and shortlisted for the J.M. Abraham Poetry Award. Her second collection, a book of love poetry, will be published by Gaspereau Press in the spring of 2020.
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