emily estelle can too shout

2010 started with confetti in my mouth and ended with glitter in my eyes. ok! the first day of the year spent recuperating from a touch-and-go hangover and reading 'top ten cute animal vids of 2010' lists. i am growing old. i am not getting out of this bed this year, ok!?

a whole lot of people have slipped into these houses,
finding them to be a good fit, and finding that
the appletrees shoot forth like champagne corks,
around the seventh of the month of may each year.


i have mild whiplash because i backed the mower into a post at full tilt. i got whiplash on something that goes 21 km/h why did they ever give me a driver's license guys.

i make things more complicated than they need to be!



ok i am drunk. but: if my aim is happiness, THEN, why would i not just kiss colt and hug everyone i encounter and fuck it all, i am going to be happy and break ears by playing my music THIS LOUD at 8:45 pm friday

don't be a dick just because we live in canada

LAST NOVEMBER

i remember how it was when the first flurried tree-branch snaps
of cold pinkened the end of your nose and it ran home
and you followed, and it was just like every single first
snowfall you had seen, but you said this one was worse.

LAST DECEMBER

do you not remember what it felt like when you went outside without shoes
and your soul flew out your mouth in a shuddering expulsion of fog
and it winged its way south and walked with the deceased in mexico
and the calendar year rolled over
and you had to wait until the spring,
playing dead to lure it back to you?

LAST JANUARY

i know you do not remember because you spent it swathed in
blankets knit by a grandmother who was
in retirement in florida and
some by the one who walked
with your soul and the dead,
one white hand to check your pulse,
hung over the side of the bed.

LAST FEBRUARY

your preserves ran out and you found the world was dripping.
you called me to say congratulations on another new year
and i asked would you please marry me in march so i'd get to see
you a little before the next chill curled your toes,
and you said next year you wouldn't be so weird
so long as i held you -

LAST MARCH

we married with our bare feet in a newborn puddle
and the flush rose in your cheeks as your
body filled with spirit, it came with little skulls hanging from
its ears and tidings from your grandmother.
"you treat that girl nicely," she was saying as you
kissed me with the sloppiness of relief,
and forgot.






someone hung up the phone on me and i went to bed for an hour. someone did not hold the door for me and smoke flew out of my ears in shopper's drug mart (maybe that's how i can keep myself warm). anyway, it's the first snow of the season, and i'm feeling a little bit raw about it.

an open letter to an arthritic blues singer covering otis redding

I HAD WANTED

not to say, only, that i love her, but to erode away the clay of
river-bottom, grey-shaded blues-club-shadows, bottom-of-the-table
brushes with gum chewed on the tongues of others while i watch
her jaw twitch with reluctance and she's lit dramatically
by the spotlight on the stage behind her

i had wanted to stray away (away, under darkness, from
black-jacketed paranoids and the watchtower glass)
from footsteps that make any sound
away from waiting on the ground floor, making excuses
to pick her up and take her out.

what i wanted was to fold her in my pocket, lock her
about my neck with little strings of words that
clip up the throat and over the tongue with a
delicious self-consciousness --
with look-what-we're-doing --
with an erotic out-of-bodiness.

i wanted to wear her out.
jazz is dazzling rhetoric for the cause of making one
let me lead one out of loneliness and into fuzziness.
we are submerged in the streets as our body heat
leaves us and rises to be caught in tree branches,
dangling above us, tendrils like rat-tails
in the mouths of the sewer.

what i wanted was to be told that she has not been touched
by any other being, that her mouth has not been the
perpetrator of any crimes against my soul's own rapture.
the reports from the panopticon were not conclusive in this regard.

and though i told her what i had wanted to tell her,
and this was that i love her like the strongest river current
loves to trip the legs of horses and pull cowboys and their
hip-shaking, child-bearing wives from the saddle to the
mouth of the ocean so their ghosts can hang like seaweed
off the trident of poseidon and whisper minute
expressions of devotion while they dance
with a whimsy like that of my love --

i could feel her slip away in increments that got larger the longer i held her,
in tiny whistling bits that flicked out like death-trills of strained piano keys
over the windowsill and into the night.

well, it's been good! i liked having this semi-public space that no one in real life could read, you know what i mean? like, this is me on my terms, admitting anything but without having to face up face-to-face, to anyone invested. i kept it public because what was the difference, and i liked being able to access my poems from other places (carefully cleaning out histories). retriever, however, saturday night in kingston, ontario told me that he has access to this thing because 'one time it was open on his mother's computer,' last august or something, and i was drunk and couldn't deal with that because how's that even possible (it's not) and everyone had moustaches drawn on our faces in licorice-scented black mr. sketch marker, i went upstairs and passed out against tanuki. do i owe this boy an apology that he feels pathetic from my point of view?

so anyway, i feel invaded. did he read it all year, when we weren't even speaking, when none of it had anything to do with him even a little bit? i'd like to still use this journal for something, but it won't be specifics, i guess.

i wake up and jog and then i have a day of some kind and then i ride my bike and then i sleep. i'm going to be lean and tough and able and though i had a straight-line of a summer everyone will say 'wow she looks great!' just wait. i think i got a job as a waitress at that place that burnt down and reopened - just to finish off that old cliché about the girl who waits tables but what she's really good at is ________. i'm still frustrated with being here in a house with my parents for so loooong into the future, it was tough at first just getting used to those major/minor losses like how before i moved out of my dorm room e. (or, colt) basically moved in for a week, and now i am a coveted daughter whose father looks out for her chastity and who's got a body pillow in her giant bed to hang onto.

but it's ok because i've got all this time to get myself lean, i still haven't eaten meat since i've been home and i'm moving down into the basement. before september comes and i finally have something that i'm doing i can bike up to finch after dark, composing breathless haikus outloud like a lunatic and thinking about fucking and peddling as fast as possible so my body's in that space that goes with either, every effort to make this sub-divided sidewalked place into something as panting and frenzied and wanting as i am. i rammed my shitty bike into a cinderblock in the dark and i flew halfway over the handlebars and it hurt but the impact fixed the gears so i can go on indefinitely like this, heaving myself up the middle of the road -

the powerfields make
a swathe of unlived-in green,
tangles and the buzz

I FEEL SAD

in that petty, 'i don't want to be living at home for the next sixteen months but i'm going to be because it's sensible' sort of way. in that 'i only really met him like two months ago so what's the deal' sort of way, neither of which i can complain about to my mother, because they're sort of silly she's right? so, to get that off my chest: i'm in a super crappy mood.

THE END

he did not come as forecast

he says, always, that
he will chalk it up to the way i tend to extend appraisals into universals,
and so he won’t be hurt when i say that sort of thing
over the phone against my temple,
i am stumbling-drunk but i called.

they’ve turned off the floodlights on the back field,
he props me against goalposts and the gloom.
his arms have that stretched look of people
who are runners and don’t eat, he plans to buy me pancakes
so i will not spill myself over curbs
(and as absolution for my body through the interval between
when i get undressed and when i pass out against his chest).
the ground swells with each step, uneven paving stones lift to trip me
and peel back into a pit of locusts
they sweep towards me,
o god my body.

somehow, we become lit and i try once more to preach.
the back section of fran’s is painted lavender,
the management believes that purple pales a holy-rolling
rage of an all-night. i have watched the sun come up
in the many opposite mirrors that line these walls,
several thousand dawns and my head from every angle,
lolling infinitely. my body roils.

he says he is only half italian and just because
his last name ends in ‘etti’ does not mean he’s got an accent
and he leaves me for a moment because i am
acting tempestuous, there is a break in the black bilious blur of tonight:
the incandescent lights have let fall a flaming sword
that splits my forehead –
i call for water to anoint me.

in this absence a man of brass slips into the booth,
my split forehead is pressed to the vinyl tablecloth
and my mind sheets across the table from my opened head
to be taken up into this other’s body,
but i can’t help mentioning
that i am pretty sure you need shoes in a restaurant.

he takes me up into his arms. he is light and fire
and with his fingers on my temples
my skull knits and the ground closes and the sky
is made bright and i would gladly be a single fingernail
and shed my shaking limbs and be torn free of the floor, o god
how have i slipped from of my seat
to be rocked by sticky and pitching tiles –

he tells me i should not believe that
i am a dignified individual the other half of the time
and i am left resonating only with
the slaps of his heels.

finally: tapwater and tidings
for a hangover and
get off the floor, o god, you,
i’m taking you home.






i should mention that i wrote the first draft of this a good month and a half ago! and i've changed my mind about most things. i don't know. no one reads this, but i always feel weird about the most disparagingly warped autobiographies that i write you know?

BREAKUP SESTINA

so finally my doctor asks me will i please think about my lungs,
really think about the work they do: rippling and pink and pulling.
i say, but, it’s been a whole week since that last cigarette on Bloor
and his stethoscope snakes with junglecat finesse up my back –
he’s got hands like yours: quick, trick joints made to unfasten,
and it’s funny how you were always also clinical, somehow.

i thought you’d dig up some deposit of lust for me, somehow,
but you’ve left for real, and left me with a rattle in my lungs.
you know, so my throat gets to be a Houdini-proof mess to unfasten,
so that i am doubled over in traffic, crazy clawing fingers pulling
at a collar, wanting for nothing more than a thump on the back
or a rescue, only this isn’t the movies, it’s a dirty stretch of Bloor.

i should be ashamed, but i almost did pitch myself to the middle of Bloor,
like the sound of my contusions would have you flying back somehow.
this was before i managed any sort of wrist-slaps of he’s-not-coming-back,
because you never did say why you left me, left me with bum lungs
and with slick full-brained flashes of your lover’s hands pulling
at a fly, how i’d get dressed just so they’d be set upon again to unfasten.

i especially should not know that your door proved impossible to unfasten,
i didn’t try hard to get in but i did not have a reason to be on Bloor.
i trace that street, barely outpacing the scruffed-up old man who is pulling
his belongings along on wire and wheels. i almost know him somehow,
we’re both wasting with something whooping that roots in the lungs,
we get caught together by a full-bodied cough that cramps the back.

so at least that’s an affinity. it was you that gave me that first smoke out back,
that stoop with the bum latch you’d get your roommate to unfasten.
i know he was the audience to our gasping production of limbs and lungs,
and was shot a sheepish out the door as i was slammed into a cab on Bloor.
i would even half-hope the driver would know and be impressed somehow
like there was heroism or innovation in our pushes and pulling –

‘it’s bronchitis’ he tells me but i am lost in thinking about pulling
you off, and my doctor knows, o shit, i am caught in snapping back.
he talks and talks. i gather i will get the lag from my lungs somehow.
he talks, my mind lags, my body in clothing wants for fingers to unfasten,
so i take a circuitous tack back so i will pass your place on Bloor,
i want to knock and wheeze about what it is you did to my lungs,

and to make you feel for me somehow: teeth bared, hair-pulling,
with yelps that shake my lungs i will make you beg to have me back,
i will set you aflame and flushed, unfasten my coat, stomp off along Bloor.