Tonight, The Mayfly

The following poem appeared in The Puritan Issue 36, Winter 2017 and is being re-published on the Town Crier as a part of June's theme on "eco-poetics.

Tonight, The Mayfly

The mayfly’s elliptical

end looks like some ruined plan

What’s buried beneath

islands? Not the catacombs

of blended footprints

coalesced, and the entire

gathering of the missed who

wait at the prisons’ gates

If a kingdom ever spawns beneath my shifting

skin, give me claim to another earth,

until all my confessions have fallen

like ghetto cobwebs

The wound of another excavation, the sacred

books of whose viscous clouts of invented ancestry:

I demand answers if only for the few 
hours I have left

Entering this world—I grow tired under the

artificial red of this flambough-night

Whose letterheads grow tired of my ruse

What actual figures fail

in the new stomachs you hope

unaltered, will calm the seas

that make my-selves unclear? I count the brittle

bones at the foundation of a family underhand—

In vas(in)deference, give me

any stake in a calling

higher than my double-visioned self.

I am yesterday, there, and then not—

In a dream I hold savage.

Open to strike February into mullet,

daughter, gestating son, miss teach,

choir-girl never nun to a mother’s discontent

Some sonorous exfoliate

Every feathered memorial in which we are like mayfly subjugations

to what’s still, a one-way glance through the window of some moving craft—

We do not suppose

Pompeii more tragic

than our invisible ports,

bearing all our children into

the potholed plan

of that inheritance.

So, tonight

between our teeth, between

index and thumb, between

washes of coral

and the immobile Achilles:

these pronouns balanced on middle

finger, this side of the chained meridian

level even the brass of your statues

Here dissect the hereafter:

commonwealth

cistern from palm-woven basket

dracula from la jabless,

René Descartes from Sesenne Descartes

Irish moss from the grilled pigtail

Decline into the mauby valley, unearth your tune & reverse time

Why choose sides when you’ve found the doctrine of sudden bloom

Well, that strandy radio beep

Kinks in the muddled script—

This time, choose not to hear

That ethnic name in dewlap misnomer,

or color codes to streak like hair.

We are not your fingertip calling wind—

Into your own insatiate coffers, bate for

single ounce ghetto-youth outpaced on

corners, swapped for palladium stars pinned

to your chests. Who rigs these four-by-four

cyphers between their bars

between charcoal & wall & banks the coloured loot

Looped tracks are these that pile up

in the trodden mines of the black mouth—the day is brief

A minor place for the Mighty Sparrow’s dying,

Here TuPac fumes the breeze with Beethoven

These networths sway through us brightest when telescopic

Yarded and beating, like bars across the skull of the earth

Count on us to stay anchored, pound for pound,

A million small lives

With no irrational fear

of flashing lights--

That long way to Goblëki & Mayfly

Hoards! What joy to outlive the fishflies

Without ever loving the mirage

music of the chain-link

Fence off

The ghetto

Canisia Lubrin is a writer, critic, teacher, and editor with work appearing in Brick, Vallum, Best Canadian Poetry 2018, Globe & Mail, and elsewhere. Her debut poetry collection, Voodoo Hypothesis (Wolsak and Wynn, 2017) was named to several notable books lists, including CBC Best Books of the Year and was nominated for the Gerald Lampert, Pat Lowther, and Raymond Souster awards. She was born in St. Lucia and lives in Whitby.